
numjhitt^aiuatmamamm* 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap, Copyright No... 

/ Shelf .iM/.fe 5 



UNITED States of America. 



LITERARY RAMBLES 
AT HOME AND ABROAD 



BY DR. WOLFE 

A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE 

Among the Haunts of Famous British Authors 

LITERARY SHRINES 

The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors 

LITERARY HAUNTS AND HOMES 
American Authors 

LITERARY RAMBLES 

At Home and Abroad 

Uniform in size and binding 

Each 'volume illustrated ivith four photogravures 
Crushed Buckram $1.2^ per 'volume. Half Calf or 
Half Morocco $J.OO per "volume. Sold separately 
or in sets 



=-«tt*»*K-.. .«aaw>': 



iV 



DORE 
vlD. I 



LFE 



AUTHOR OF A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE, LITER- 
ARY SHRINES, LITERARY HAUNTS AND HOMES 
ETC. 



JP>r'J!«l»i-.X:-a6rA-E i.. 



.'»i»>'7-»»- .»»^- 








S CI- 



LITERARY 
RAMBLES 

AT HOME AND ABROAD 



BY THEODORE F. WOLFE 
M.D. Ph.D. 

AUTHOR OF A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE, LITER- 
ARY SHRINES, LITERARY HAUNTS AND HOMES 
ETC. 







^..••^ 



PHILADELPHIA & LONDON 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
MDCCCCI 



65968 

JL itor**.; y of Oori</r«>e« 

I V\ • .^PkU Kfcctueo 

OCT 25 1900 

i Copyright entry 



SECl^ND COPY, 
Of^'»ver«d t» 

QHOtA DIVISION, 
NOV 19 1900 



TK 



,W4^ 



Copyright, 1900, 

BY 

Theodore F. Wolfe. 



Printed BY J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 



#/l «#*' 



PREFACE 

T IKE its predecessors, this volume is complete 
in itself; nevertheless I am desirous that it 
should be appraised in connection w^ith the preced- 
ing volumes, to which it is related. The first five 
chapters herein presented extend the list of American 
authors whose homes and resorts are sketched in the 
books ** Literary Shrines" and ** Literary Haunts 
and Homes' ' ; the later chapters add to the succes- 
sion of popular British authors the scenes of whose 
lives and works are treated of in **A Literary Pil- 
grimage." 

Like its predecessors, too, the materials for this vol- 
ume have been derived fi"om repeated or prolonged 
sojourns in the localities described, and from per- 
sonal intercourse and correspondence with many of 
the authors mentioned or with their surviving families 
and friends. 

Most of these chapters were written beside the 
dying-bed of my wife, my sympathetic and appreci- 
ative companion in the rambles upon which this and 
the earlier volumes — dedicated to her — are founded: 
the final chapter was completed bv her grave. 

T. F. W. 
S 



CONTENTS 



AT HOME 

PAGE 

Along the Hudson: Homes and Themes of 
Many Authors, 
Poe— Audubon— Cozzens— Artemus Ward—Southiuorth — 
John Kendrick Bangs — Butler — Dr. SAaiv — Win- 
ston Churchill — Ir-ving — Warner Sisters— Bigelotu — 
Roe - Morris - Willis - Mrs. Barr - Headley - 
Verplanck—Joel Benton— John Burroughs— Paul- 
ding— Ichabod Crane^ etc. ^ etc 15 

A New Jersey [Ramble : Literary Land- 
marks of Newark, etc. 
Cooper and Irving Scenes — Hoboken — Sands — Bryant — 
Halleck-Neivark-The Gilders -Dr. Coles-Talley- 
rand — Chateaubriand — Shelley'' s Grandfather — 
Stephen Crane — Stedman — Mrs. Dodge — Marion 
Harland'—Dr. Ward — Amanda M. Douglas- Mrs. 
Kinney - Noah Brooks — Thomas Dunn English — 
Thomas Moore — Cockloft Hall — Ray Palmer — 
Henry William Herbert^ etc 39 

Where Stockton Wrote his Stories. 
Rutherford Home — Scenes of Rudder Grange— Pomona — 
Other Characters— The Holty Madison — Author'' s 

7 



Contents 

PAGE 

Workshop — Historic Morristotun and its Writers — 
Virginia Scenes of Fiction — Mrs. Null — Ardis 
Claverden, etc. — Stockton"" s Present Home — Study — 
Con-versations — Method of Literary Work — Solu- 
tions of " The Lady or the Tiger ? " etc. ... 64 

The Haunts of Walt Whitman. 
Camden — The Ferry — Whitman s Comrades — Where his 
Mother Died— Stevens Street — Eminent Visitors — 
Mickle Street House — Poefs Chamber and Associa- 
tions — Poems — Relics — Timber Creek — Whitman"" s 
Resorts in : Field and Wood -His Funeral— His 
Tomb gr 



A Literary Pilgrimage by the Delaware. 
Cooper^ s Ancestors — Birthplace — Burlington — Dr. Eng- 
lish — Frank R. Stockton — Bordentoivn — Hopkinson 
— Paine — Gilder — Trenton — Where Dr. Abbott 
Li-ves and Writes -His Habits of Composition — 
Places of Disco'veries and Sketches — Scenes of Fic- 
tion— ^* Clementine ^^ Hoivarth 100 



ABROAD 

Stratford-on-Avon. 
Thames-Side Literary Landmarks — Avon Vale— Strat- 
ford -The Birthplace - Ne%u Place -Guild Chapel 
-Grammar School - Holy Trinity Church -The 
Tomb- Memorial -Dr. Hall -Red Horse Inn - 
Hathaivay Cottage - Where Shakespeare ivas Mar- 
ried— Other Shrines . . . .121 

8 



Contents 

PAGE 

Byron's Harrow : Kensal Green. 
Some London Shrines— Gra'ves of Thackeray^ Hunt^ Sydney 
Smithy Hood, Mrs. Haivthorne, Dickens' s Little 
Nell, etc.— Harroiv School — Eminent Pupils— By- 
ron s School-room — Relics— Resorts — His School Days 
and Friends — His Daughter'' s Grwve — His Mary — 
Vieiv from Hill 140 

The Grave of Childe Harold. 

Hucknall-Torkard— Market-place— Ancient Church Toiver 
—Recollections of Byron" s Funeral— Perfunctory Cere- 
monial— The Byron Vault and Contents— The Poet 
and Ada— Joe Murray — Byron' s Monument— His 
Daughter'' s— Notable Visitors — La Guiccioli, etc . 157 

The Ayrshire Burnsland. 
Shrines by the Way — Old Ayr — Tarn 0' Shanter Inn - 
Alloivay Cottage — Relics — Haunted Kirk — Brig 
0' Doon — Mount OUphant — Lochlea — Tarbolton — 
Homes of Bonnie Jean and Mary Morison — Poosie 
Nansie' s — Hamilton'' s — Churchyard of Holy Fair — 
Mossgiel — Scenes of Poems — Shanter Farm . . 1 70 

The English Lakeland and its many 
Writers. 
Jane Eyre— Robert Elsmere— Wilson s Elleray—Hemans— 
Harriet Martineau — Arnold— Rydal Mount — Nab 
Cottage — Dove Cottage — Wordsivorth and De 
S^uincey — Scenes of ^^Opium-Eater'"' — Grasmere 
Church and Churchyard — Hel'vellyn — Words- 
ivorth' s Birthplace and School — Ruskin s Brant- 
ivood— Scenes of Hall Caine" s Fiction — Shelley'' s 
Cottage — Home of Coleridge and Sout hey . . . 190 

9 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Claymont, the Home of Frank R. Stockton Frontispiece ' 

Tomb of Walt Whitman 98 V 

Ancient Hucknall Church 158V 

Dove Cottage 200 ^ 



AT HOME 



ALONG THE HUDSON: 

HOMES AND THEMES OF 

MANY AUTHORS 



Poe — Audubon — Cozzens —Artemus Ward— Southivorth —John 
Kendrick Bangs — Butler— Dr. Shaiv — Winston Churchill 
—Ir'ving— Warner Sisters —Bigeloiv—Roe —Morris — Willis- 
Mrs. Barr—Headley—Verplanck— Joel Benton— John Bur- 
roughs— Paulding— Ichabod Crane, etc.y etc. 

TT^ROM the wilderness to the ocean the course 
■■- of the lordly Hudson is replete with the en- 
chantments of poetry, romance, and tradition. 
From the time of Juet's quaijit narrative of its 
first exploration the river has been the scene of 
events which have been recounted in every form 
of literature, while its legendary associations and 
its beauties of flood and shore have inspired many 
noble works of art. For the literary wayfarer 
the majestic stream has the added charm of inti- 
mate connection with the lives of gifted writers 
who have found homes as well as themes upon 
its banks, and have embalmed in their books its 
scenery and traditions. 

Irving gave to it the devotion of a lifetime and, 
although the tales of Cooper invest its upper 
course with the glamour of romance, yet it is 
chiefly to the facile pen of Irving that the Hud- 
son owes its opulence of poetical and sentimental 

IS 



Literary Rambles 

associations ; everywhere along the lower and 
middle reaches of the river — the portions tra- 
versed in this ramble — we may find the impress 
of his genius and love. 

Opposite to the city of Irving's birth lies Ho- 
boken, the sometime home of Bryant and Sands, 
which gave title to Fay's once popular romance, 
and a little way beyond is the spot, sung by the 
muse of Sands where, at the foot of the ledge by 
the riverside, the great writer of " The Fede- 
ralist'* fell by the hand of Burr. Above this 
place tower the cliffs of the Weehawken of 
Halleck's ** Fanny," where the rambler may 
yet enjoy the view of " city, shore, and sparkling 
bay," which entranced the poet, although he 
will find much of the great crags broken into 
paving-blocks and the "poetic solitudes," once 
frequented by Halleck, Bryant, Sands, and Ver- 
planck, profaned by beer gardens. 

From the Manhattan shore at the foot of 
Eighty-third Street rises a rocky knoll where Foe 
often sat and looked upon the river's moving 
tides while he meditated his compositions ; possi- 
bly «*The Raven" was pondered here, since 
there is some reason to believe it was written 
while the poet boarded with the Brennans in 
this neighborhood. In a hostelry which over- 
looked the river from the *« Claremont Hill " of 

i6 



Weehawken — Poe and Cozzens 

Doctor van Dyke's poem, Halleck sojourned when 
he wrote the epiclet of *' Fanny," and a mile be- 
yond we find, by the green river-bank, the embow- 
ered mansion — menaced now with demolition — 
in which the great Audubon lived, worked and 
died, and the shaded spot in the near-by cemetery 
where he lies in the last sleep. 

A few miles above the **Spijt den Duyvel" of 
Knickerbocker's veracious chronicle still stands near 
the shore the picturesque *' Chestnut Cottage " of 
Frederick S. Cozzens, little changed since that 
genial author dwelt and wrote here and made this 
spot the scene of the humorous incidents of his 
* * Sparrowgrass Papers" and other sketches. Coz- 
zens here entertained his literary friends — Halleck, 
Thackeray, Irving, Monckton Milnes and others of 
lesser fame. Financial reverses subsequently obliged 
him to remove from the place, but his mortal part 
was brought at last to rest in the cemetery of this 
** ancient Dorp of Yonkers" not far from his be- 
loved home. In Yonkers we find, on Pine Street, 
a pretty cottage, nov/ enlarged, in which that prince 
of jesters, Artemus Ward, lived for a time, and 
wrote some of his irresistibly droll articles, and 
which he bequeathed to his mother ; on a corner 
of Warburton Avenue, not far away, the prolific 
writer, Mrs. Southworth, whose name was so dear 
to novel readers of the past generation, dwelt for 

B 17 



Literary Rambles 

some years and produced a score or so of her numer- 
ous tales. 

In this neighborhood, too, the clever and vivacious 
John Kendrick Bangs has composed most of his 
books. His present residence is a tasteful and com- 
modious villa set in a garden on North Broadway ; 
his hbrary is a spacious book-lined south room, com- 
manding a superb view that embraces the opposite 
Palisades and a long reach of the shining river, and 
here he accomplishes his editorial work and writes 
delightful books like "Coffee and Repartee," **A 
House-Boat on the Styx," "Ghosts I Have Met," 
etc. An elegant and substantial mansion on the 
summit of a terraced hill near by has long been the 
home of the millionaire lawyer-author, William Allen 
Butler — best known as the godfather of Flora 
McFlimsey — who has here produced, besides his 
prose compositions, many more thoughtful and meri- 
torious poems than "Nothing to Wear." 

At Hastings we find, by the river-shore, a sightly 
little bluff which once held the summer home of 
David Dudley Field, the eminent legal author, and 
the spot is especially interesting now since it is the 
chosen habitation of that erudite essayist, editor, and 
writer on municipal government. Doctor Shaw of 
The Review of Reviews. Ardsley, a few miles 
above, was for a time the abode of Winston Church- 
ill ; he dvv^elt in a long, low, irregular, rambling 

i8 



Winston Churchill, Bangs, Irving 

house on Broadway, and it was here, in the autumn 
of 1896, that he began to write ** Richard Carvel," 
the vivid and picturesque historical novel which ob- 
tained such prodigious vogue. 

Irving' s charming homelet — now a minor part 
of the mansion which his grand-nephew inhabits — 
stands amid scenes he made familiar to his readers, 
and looks out, between the trees he planted, upon 
the river of his love. His ** dear little Sunny side," 
Tarrytown, and that mystic region of Sleepy Hollow 
where Irving now sleeps in the spot his pen has im- 
mortalized, are sketched in a previous volume of this 
series. 1 The Tappan Sea, which figures in more 
than one of Irving's legends, Hes before these Irving 
shrines ; upon its opposite shore is Piermont and, 
far up on the slope behind the town, with a wide 
outlook upon verdant valley and brimming river, is 
the sometime dwelling-place of Lewis Gaylord Clark, 
where he penned many of his luminous articles 
for the Knickerbocker and entertained the galaxy 
of contributors to that famous periodical. Nearer 
the river on this western shore and overlooked by 
Hook Mountain is the Carscallen villa of Upper 
Nyack — a spacious and handsome mansion en- 
vironed by acres of lawn, orchard and garden, with 
fountains, flowers and ornamental shrubberies, in 
which Churchill completed «* Richard Carvel." 
1 See *' Literary Haunts and Homes." 

19 



Literary Rambles 

A decade of miles beyond Irving' s grave the river 
flows between rugged heights that fortress the en- 
trance to the sublime defile of the Highlands. On 
our right rises the Anthony's Nose of ** Knicker- 
bocker's History" ; on the left towers the Donder 
Berg, haunt of the ** little bulbous-bottomed Dutch 
goblins" of Irving' s legend of **The Storm King," 
who used to be heard here, in the midst of tempests, 
** giving orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of 
a fresh gust of wind or the rattling off of another 
thunderclap.'* Other miles of strolling through a 
romantic mountain region bring us to a resort of 
Irving' s, "The Grange," the ancient seat of the 
Philipses. Here Irving often came, accompanied 
by Paulding, Kemble and other friends of the 
** Salmagundi " days. The hospitable mansion was 
burned just after Irving' s death, but the place is still 
the possession of the family whom he visited, and 
near it flows the picturesque mountain stream he 
described in *'The Angler" as the scene of his own 
piscatorial experience with Brevoort, whose elab- 
orate outfit is pictured in that chapter of the ** Sketch- 
Book." 

Foe was once a cadet in the miUtary school on 
the rock-bound promontory of West Point in the 
heart of the Highlands, and upon the opposite mar- 
gin of the grand river-pass lies historic Constitution 
Island, long the home of the sisters Warner. The 

20 



Where Miss Warner Lived and Wrote 

picturesque island is largely composed of steep and 
rude masses of rock, partially clothed by native 
trees, and it is now connected with the eastern 
shore by reedy marshlands. To this seclusion 
Henry W. Warner, author of *'The Liberties of 
America," brought his gifted daughters many years 
ago, and here most of their literary works were pro- 
duced. The dwelling is an extended, low, old- 
fashioned, rambling edifice of varying styles and 
materials, manifestly erected at different periods to 
suit the requirements of the occupants. The oldest 
portion, with low ceiling and great fireplace, dates 
fi-om the time when it was a barrack of the Fort 
Constitution which was built upon the lower portion 
of the island in 1776 to defend a heavy chain 
stretched across the river to bar the advance of the 
British fleet, one end of the chain being anchored 
here, near the place of the present boat-house. A 
newer portion of the dwelling is fitted for a conser- 
vatory, giant oaks tower above the low roofs and 
embrace with their branches the quaint walls, a 
broad lawn slopes at one side, the river' s fiiUest flow 
isolates the place fi-om disturbing influences — alto- 
gether it is an ideal abode for an imaginative writer. 
Here the famous Susan Warner, who never wrote 
at a desk in an especially appointed study, penned 
much of her fiction in the shade of the woods or in 
a tent set up in a pleasant nook near the house. 

21 



Literary Rambles 

From this retreat she first sent forth **The Wide, 
Wide World" — one of the most popular novels 
ever written by an American, whose instant and 
enormous success made her famous in both hemi- 
spheres; next she produced the scarcely less popular 
**Queechy," which has been by many deemed 
her best book. Among the several others which 
followed, the story of * * The Hills of Shatemuc ' ' 
was laid upon the rugged river-shore among scenes 
which formed a part of her daily vision. In this 
insular home, too, her younger sister, Anna B. 
Warner, wrote successful books : * * Patience, ' ' 
*« Dollars and Cents," "The Fourth Watch," and 
others which were well received and widely read. 
The island is still the home of the younger Miss 
Warner who, with a pair of trusty colored servitors, 
spends much of each year in this romantic retire- 
ment, where she has recently been engaged upon a 
volume of memoirs not yet published. The body 
of the more famous sister lies near the Cadets' Mon- 
ument, in the military cemetery just opposite to her 
beloved island home. A fitting memorial, placed 
by her sister *'in trust for a few of the friends that 
loved her," marks the spot. Its inscription names 
her "The Author of 'The Wide, Wide World' — 
born I St July, 1 8 1 9 ; passed gently into the Hfe 
that knows no ending 17th March, 1885. Auf 
Wiedersehen.^^ 

22 



"Culprit Fay" — Bigelow — Kemble 

Susan Warner died while sojourning in a house 
which stands at the entrance to "The Squirrels," 
the estate of John Bigelow at Highland Falls, a mile 
below West Point. A few rods distant a quaint 
and delightful old wooden mansion, whose most 
important apartment is its well-filled library, over- 
looks the Hudson fi-om a steep cliiF above the rail- 
way; and here Mr. Bigelow — author, editor, and 
diplomat, the associate and biographer of Bryant — 
is spending the evening of life among his books. A 
neat frame cottage, which we find in a garden just 
back of ««The Squirrels," was for ten years the 
parsonage of E. P. Roe, and in the narrow room 
behind the parlor he began his career as a novelist 
by writing ** Barriers Burned Away," and other 
graphic stories which reached a vast audience. 

Commanding the Point, the island, and a ribbon 
of glistening river rise the crags of old Cro' Nest. 
Its scant and shaggy foliage Joseph Rodman Drake 
peopled with the dainty company of elves in his 
exquisite poem, and the reach of water that sweeps 
below he made the scene of the venturous voyage 
of **The Culprit Fay" in the tiny boatlet of pur- 
ple and pearl. Here among the Highlands, where 
forest-crowned moiuntains stand with their feet in the 
flood, we see the sometime "Bachelor's Elysium" 
of Gouvemeur Kemble, — Irving' s friend "with the 
heart of pure gold," — who was "The Patroon" 

23 



Literary Rambles 

of the ancient Cockloft Hall celebrated in ** Salma- 
gundi.'* The Kemble mansion stands upon the 
acclivity which Irving could * * not mount without 
blowing ' ' because of his * ' villainous propensity to 
grow round and robustious." A golf course has 
been laid out in the grounds ; the dignified old 
dwelling and its old-fashioned furniture are essen- 
tially unchanged since the time Irving sojourned 
there, and literators hke Paulding, Kennedy, Willis, 
Lossing, and Morris were welcome guests, but the 
beloved **Patroon" has lain for twenty-five years 
in the cemetery of Cold Spring. 

Northward towers Mount Taurus, the " Bull 
Hill " which in Irving' s story of " Dolph Heyliger '* 
bellowed back the storm that had rolled up the de- 
file of the Highlands from Donder Berg. From a 
beautiful terrace below the impending cliff of Taurus, 
the former home of George P. Morris peeps forth 
fi-om embowering foliage upon the noble stream and 
the rock-ribbed heights of the western shore. The 
substantial Doric edifice seems little changed save 
by neglect ; it retains its imposing portico and pil- 
lars and we miss only the fountain which in the 
poet's day danced and plashed before his door. 
This *< Undercliff" was long the gifted song- 
writer's favorite residence, sometime presided over 
by his daughter Ida, the ** nymph of mountain 
birth" of his poem "Where Hudson's Wave." 

24 



Homes of Morris and Willis 

The little north room, whose window afFords a 
superb prospect of Newburgh Bay, was his study, 
and here many of his lyrics were penned. To this 
house his final summons came, and in a decaying 
vault of the old village cemetery, with his * ' fair and 
gentle Ida" by his side, the writer of ** Woodman, 
Spare that Tree" sleeps in the voiceless mystery. 

Almost directly opposite is the spot which Morris' s 
partner and literary associate, Willis, found a pic- 
turesque wilderness — ''a mere idle wild" — and 
converted into the delightful home which his grace- 
ful pen made familiar to the world of readers as 
* ' Idlewild. ' ' Beneath lofty Highland peaks an 
elevated plateau extends from the river backward to 
western hills, and upon this terrace, at a point where 
it rises two hundred feet above the water, is perched 
the handsome Gothic cottage which was the last home 
of the poet of "Unseen Spirits." Before it a 
spacious lawn declines toward the river ; at the back 
is the great craggy ravine, darkened by overhanging 
hemlocks, at the bottom of which foams and falls the 
wild mountain rivulet once made famous by Willis's 
letters ; and about the place on every hand are objects 
and scenes he pleasantly depicted in his books. 

Shrubbery of abundant foliage and tall evergreens 
which the poet planted embosom the house he built 
— an ample, two-storied, multi-gabled edifice of 
painted bricks, with dormers in the steep roofs, bay- 

25 



Literary Rambles 

windows and shaded piazzas on front and side, and 
with vines climbing above the Gothic entrance. 
Little has been altered since Willis was carried hence 
to his grave. The central hall and stairs have been 
widened somewhat, but we may still see at the right 
his parlor, whose spacious bay-window commands 
the verdant slope of lawn, the shining river, the 
steeps of the opposite shore and the more distant 
tree-clad mountains as described in his ** Across- 
river View"; the adjoining room, which was his 
library, and, above it, the contracted apartment 
where he wrote and where the space not occupied 
by his invalid couch was filled with books, journals, 
and manuscripts. 

The works which gained Willis his early reputa- 
tion — including the once vastly popular poems upon 
scriptural themes — were produced before he knew 
* < Idlewild " : in this home he spent the last two 
decades of his busy literary life, here he suffered 
prolonged torments of physical disease such as few 
literators have been doomed to endure, and here, 
on his sixty-first birthday, his spirit passed through 
the mufEed gate of death. 

To this cultured home came many guests — 
Dana, Whipple, Fields, Irving, Kennedy, Morris, 
Halleck, De Trobriand, Bayard Taylor, and others 
of similar renown. The incidents of Willis's idyllic 
life here, his garden and trees, his children and 

26 



Idle wild — Roelands 

horses, the floods in the glen, the peculiarities of his 
rural neighbors, the varying aspects of nature, the 
charms of this wondrous landscape about his home — 
great Storm King looming in the south, the broad 
bend of river in front, the sail-dotted expanse of 
bay in the north, the green shores and valleys 
studded v^ith villas and villages — were with deft 
touch and airy grace woven into the papers written 
here for his Home Journal and subsequently pub- 
lished in his last volumes, ** Out-Doors at Idle- 
wild," and «<The Convalescent." 

Near by is the quiet farmhouse where Willis so- 
journed before he built "Idlewild," and to which 
Bayard Taylor brought, in hopeless search for 
health, the adored Mary Agnew, who, a few 
months later, left his arms to enter the shadowy 
realm. 

At Cornwall, too, lived for nearly a quarter of a 
century that earnest and effective writer, Edward 
P. Roe. His dwelling, a gabled frame fabric with 
a wide veranda extending along its front, still stands 
well back from the street in the midst of park-like 
grounds of many acres. A garden of flowers 
blooms in front; picturesque old fruit trees and 
more symmetrical maples and evergreens cluster 
about the mansion and are disposed through the 
grounds, from whose shades we enjoy enchanting 
prospects of Storm King, Breakneck, and other 

27 



Literary Rambles 

Highland peaks, and of the river gleaming through 
the foliage. The house, yet owned by the nov- 
elist's family, has been changed since his death only 
by the removal of his furniture and personal belong- 
ings. A shelf-lined room adjoining the parlor held 
his Hbrary of four thousand volumes, and here one 
or tv^o of his tales were written, but his later books 
were composed in what he called his *' sky-parlor." 
This is a large, airy apartment which he prepared 
for a literary workshop, high up among the tree- 
tops in one of the gables. Its windows look across 
the lawns and gardens of his own **Roelands," and 
command a curving expanse of the river and the 
rugged forms of near-by mountains. With this 
landscape in view he sat here at his escritoire — a 
walnut union of drawers, closets, and desk, still 
preserved by his family — and penned ** Nature's 
Serial Story," «« He Fell in Love with His Wife," 
and a dozen or more of similarly popular books. 
The fruit culture, of which he wrote so enthusias- 
tically, he practised on the acres near his home, 
and, for successive seasons, when his strawberry 
beds were red with luscious abundance, the Au- 
thors Club came here by invitation to feast with 
him upon the fruit. A little way back from the 
house the townspeople have laid out a little green 
which they have named Roe Park, and here they 
have set, in a massive boulder, a suitably inscribed 

28 



Roe — Mrs. Barr — Headley 

bronze tablet in commemoration of the author who 
was to them a neighbor beloved, and who now 
rests in death among them. 

The novelist of *«A Bow of Orange Ribbon" 
inhabits a home high on the green mountain-side in 
this vicinage. Hers is the charmingly irregular 
cottage-dwelling locally known as ** Cherry Croft." 
It is placed in pleasantly shaded grounds, among or- 
chards and plats, and, with its steep gables, oc- 
tagonal tower, vine-embowered verandas and striped 
awnings, is a pleasing feature of an altogether pleas- 
ing landscape. 

Cases of costly books, a tiled fireplace, handsome 
pictures and bric-a-brac make Mrs. Barr's library a 
most attractive place and the many rooms of the 
house are furnished in a fashion which indicates the 
taste and culture of the gifted owner, who returns 
to them early after her winters in New York or the 
South and spends most of the year amid this inspir- 
iting environment. In this house and its neigh- 
borhood she has composed nearly all her books, 
including <* Friend Olivia," "A Daughter of Fife," 
** Trinity Bells" and other widely read novels. 

From the western shore of Newburgh Bay 
** Cedar Lawn," erst the home of Joel T. Headley, 
overlooks the broad bay and the great river-gorge 
southward to West Point. In this picturesque re- 
tirement the popular author resided during twenty- 

29 



Literary Rambles 

two years and here wrote "Napoleon and his 
Marshals," "The Great Rebellion," and most of 
his famous books of history and biography. At 
Newburg, too, lives the novelist, Adelaide Skeel, 
among the scenes of her clever romance, ** King 
Washington." 

Eastward of the bay lies the arena of some of the 
adventures of Enoch Crosby, the Harvey Birch of 
Cooper's «*Spy," and the ancient Fishkill church 
was the scene of his imprisonment after the mock 
trial. Fishkill is the birthplace of Mrs. Townsend, 
the poet of **Down the Bayou," ** Distaff and 
Spindle," etc. Mount Gulian, nearer the river, 
is the ancestral mansion of the Verplancks in which 
the Society of the Cincinnati was organized. Here 
that polished writer Gulian C. Verplanck — some- 
time the Hterary partner of Bryant and Sands — 
dwelt for many years, and his grave is made in the 
Fishkill burial-ground, a thousand leagues away from 
the tomb of the bright being whose early death made 
him for sixty-five years a widowed mourner. De- 
spite the encroachments of brickyards. Mount Gulian 
retains much of its environment of broad acres and 
noble trees ; the venerable mansion preserves all its 
antique peculiarities, and we may see the quaint 
rooms unchanged since Verplanck here completed 
his scholarly edition of Shakespeare, and entertained 
guests of the literary quality of Irving, Cooper, 

30 



"The Spy" — Verplanck — Burroughs 

Paulding, Bryant and Lord Houghton. At Fishkill 
Landing lived and lately died that well-known 
writer and critic, Clarence Cook, author of * * The 
House Beautiful." 

The low plateau that projects into the river above 
Newburg Bay is the Duyvel's Dans-Kamer of 
** Knickerbocker's History," where Peter Stuyve- 
sant's crew were **most horribly frightened by a 
gang of merry, roystering devils, frisking on the 
huge flat rock." 

Poughkeepsie is the place of abode of the talented 
and versatile Joel Benton — poet, essayist, critic — 
whose contributions to periodical Hterature have, 
even more than his books, made him familiar to the 
reading public. 

High above the river-verge at West Park abides 
that worthy successor of Thoreau, John Burroughs 
— our * * Prophet of O utdoordo m . " * * Riverby , ' ' 
the name of his beautiful home, suggested the title 
of one of the volumes written here and is the brand- 
mark which covers certain more material products 
of the author's culture. In the midst of his acres 
he chose for the site of his dwelling a spot which 
commands the lordly river and an undulating sweep 
of the green hills of Dutchess, and here, more than 
twenty years ago, he planned and erected the 
house, the story of whose construction he has so 
pleasantly told to his readers. The stones and 

31 



Literary Rambles 

woods of the structure are mostly native to his 
own lands and, by the sympathetic treatment of 
these materials, a pleasing and picturesque edifice 
has been produced, so entirely in harmony with its 
surroundings that it almost seems to be a natural 
feature of the landscape. It is a commodious ga- 
bled fabric, three stories in height, with broad 
porches and balconies, and with vines mantling 
its stone walls. 

An apartment whose windows look down the 
Hudson toward the distant Highlands was for years 
the study of this poet, philosopher, and ** literary 
naturalist," and here he wrote most of his earlier 
books, among them being *« Winter Sunshine,'* 
** Birds and Sunshine," and **Pepacton." Fruit- 
fill orchards and the vineyards which yield the 
**Riverby" grapes fall away to the river-bank; on 
the brow of the decline, at a little distance from the 
house, stands the diminutive square structure, cov- 
ered with rough bark and lined with books, which 
for sixteen years has been Burroughs' s private den 
and workshop, and where his later books have been 
penned, embracing *« Fresh Fields," ''Signs and 
Seasons," *'Riverby," ««A Year in the Fields," 
"Alaska," etc. 

The adjoining acres, as well as the ruder areas 
of his "Whitman Land," have been the scenes of 
his rural employments, and have yielded a profuse 

32 



Burroughs's Whitman Land — Paulding 

fruitage not quoted in the market price-lists. Dur- 
ing his operations afield the brain of the thinker is 
not idle, and the sensitive perceptions of the natural- 
ist are quick to note the significance of every detail 
of life and nature; when the autumnal firosts suspend 
his outdoor occupations and stir him to expression, 
he takes up his pen and, in the seclusion of the 
bark-clad study, clothes in vivid and sprightly dic- 
tion the thoughts, fancies, and observations of the 
golden summer hours. 

A more recently acquired tract of savage, rocky, 
and swampy land, a mile west of the railway, is 
named by Burroughs ** Whitman Land,'* because 
he thinks *'in many ways it is typical of the poet," 
combining ruggedness and grandeur with tenderness 
and geniality. This tract Burroughs has partially 
cleared and, in a sheltered spot at the border of the 
now drained and cultivated bog, he has erected a 
rustic cabin of shaggy-barked slabs, with a great 
chimney of stone and a shaded porch about which 
the birds nest and sing. Excepting a few books 
and pictures the fiirniture of his "Slabsides" is of 
the simplest and, like the cabin, is chiefly the work 
of his own hands, being constructed fi-om the woods 
and barks that grow near by. Here the author 
usually remains fi-om April to autumn, giving some 
time to his bachelor housekeeping, more to many 
visitors, still more to his business affairs, and having 

c 33 



Literary Rambles 

yet a little left for occasional literary tasks. It was 
here that his study of Whitman was partly written, 
and some of his later essays. 

James K. Paulding, the successor of Brockden 
Brown in American letters, and the friend and early 
literary associate of Irving, passed the autumn of life 
in a charming retreat a little way above Hyde Park. 
It was after his retirement from President Van 
Buren' s cabinet that he came to * * Placedentia ' ' and 
resumed, with almost the zest of the period of his 
** Backwoodsman" and ** Dutchman's Fireside," 
the beloved literary pursuits which his political ca- 
reer had interrupted. Paulding's mansion is pic- 
turesquely placed upon a commanding terrace from 
which the ground falls away in gentle undulations 
to the river, two or three furlongs distant; the view 
which Irving so much admired embraces a beautiful 
expanse of animating landscape, — miles of the sil- 
very river with its many moving craft, the lessening 
perspectives of the lovely shores, the giant mountain- 
forms looming to the horizon in the hazy distance. 
The dwelling has been something enlarged since 
Paulding's time, but we may still see the room in 
which he died, and the place of the library where 
the veteran author penned several of his twenty- 
seven now almost forgotten volumes, including 
"The Old Continental" and "The Puritan and 
His Daughter," the latter being written at the ad- 
vanced age of seventy- two. 

34 



Placedentia — The Catskills 

As we journey northward we see the great pile 
of the Catskills upholding the western sky, their 
towering summits tinted with purple and blue or 
hooded with gray mists. At their feet lies the vil- 
lage where that once productive and popular nov- 
ehst, Ann S. Stephens, sometime dwelt; among the 
mountain recesses is shown the scene of Rip Van 
Winkle's misadventure with the goblin and the 
flagon, as narrated in Irving' s immortal legend, and 
on summer afternoons, when the sky is darkened 
with clouds, we may yet sometimes hear the ghostly 
crew of Hendrick Hudson at their game of ninepins. 
In one wild glen we find the loftly waterfall which 
the hero of Cooper's ** Pioneers" thought **the 
best piece of work he'd met with in the woods," 
and by which he loved to sit in dreamy meditation. 
From the sightly point where ** Leather- Stocking" 
used to stand we look upon the matchless panorama 
which he described to Edwards ; we see with him 
** seventy miles of the river looking like a curled 
shaving under our feet," and, across the shimmer- 
ing green of the vast landscape, the rugged High- 
lands, the misty peaks of the Taghconics, and the 
fainter outlines of the far Hampshire hills. 

Farther up the valley, and but a few miles dis- 
tant from the river-bank we find, amid pleasant pas- 
toral scenes, the estate of Lindenwald, for many 
happy years the home of Martin Van Buren, but 
interesting to us chiefly on account of its connection 

35 



Literary Rambles 

with Irving and his work. That author was for a 
time associated with Van Buren at the American 
Legation in London, they were companions in a 
visit to Newstead and other literary shrines of Eng- 
land, and when Van Buren became President he 
tendered to Irving a cabinet portfolio which the 
latter declined. 

In Irving' s early manhood Lindenwald was the 
country-seat of Judge Van Ness — the author of 
**Aristides" — to whose ancestors Knickerbocker 
avers we are indebted for the invention of buck- 
wheat cakes. The judge, who had been Burr's 
second in the fateful duel with Hamilton, was an 
attached friend of Irving, and when he suffered the 
sorrow of his life in the death of his fair fiance, 
Matilda Hoffman, he was invited to retire for a 
time to this spot, and during the months of his 
sojourn he sought forgetfulness of his grief in ab- 
sorbing literary occupation. Here he revised and 
completed the peerless ** History of New York," — 
in which he mentions his host's family, — working 
upon it for some hours of each day in the same 
chamber where Van Buren afterward died. In 
Irving' s time the mansion was a plain square brick 
edifice shaded by pines and lindens ; it was en- 
larged and beautified by Van Buren, who purchased 
it from his law-preceptor. Van Ness; among the 
notable additions being a spacious library and an 

36 



Irving and the Real Ichabod Crane 

observatory which yet towers above the roofs and 
overlooks an extensive and beautifiil view. Of this 
delightful residence Irving' s niece later became mis- 
tress. It is now owned by the farmer who tills the 
environing acres, and is essentially unchanged since 
the ex- President's death; much of his furniture re- 
mains in the commodious rooms, and the scores of 
magnificent pines that cluster upon the lawn were 
here when Irving knew the place. 

It was here that Irving made the acquaintance 
of Jesse Merwin, a young schoolmaster ** boarding 
round" in the neighborhood, whom he afterward 
burlesqued in Ichabod Crane. A liking grew up 
between the author and the teacher, and their fi-iend- 
ship and correspondence continued until death. 
After Irving' s literary task for the day was done he 
would go to the schoolhouse and wait until his 
friend had dismissed the pupils, then the two would 
take long walks through the country-side — walks 
of which the pedagogue ever retained delightful 
memories. Once they went fishing together on a 
lakelet not far distant, where they compensated 
their ill-success in piscicapture by plundering the 
canoe of a more skilful angler, the ** vagabond ad- 
miral of the lake," John Moore. It was the 
qualities and conduct of this Moore which suggested 
to Irving the skulking and vagrant cosmopolite 
whom he named Dirk Schuiler in " Knickerbocker's 

11 



Literary Rambles 

History" — a character which he introduced into 
that chronicle during his residence here among the 
haunts of the vagabond original. 

Near Lindenwald we find the place of the school, 
but the old log building in which the real Ichabod 
Crane urged the tough, broad-bottomed Dutch 
boys ** along the flowery path of knowledge" in 
Irving' s day, has long disappeared. For half a 
century the master has slept beneath the daisies; 
but on the hill behind his school stands the sub- 
stantial farmhouse where he lived and died, where 
he proudly named a favorite child after his illustrious 
friend and companion of the early time, and where 
now dwells his younger son, an esteemed member 
of the community. Merwin's sepulchre is near 
that of Van Buren in the cemetery of the historic 
Dutch church at near-by Kinderhook, and is one 
of the sights of the place. It is marked by a square 
upright monument of marble, whose simple inscrip- 
tion shows that he died at the age of sixty-eight, 
and that, in the incessant procession to the grave, 
he preceded by seven years the great writer who 
had made all the world laugh at his whimsical 
caricature as the pedagogue of Sleepy Hollow. 



38 



A NEW JERSEY RAMBLE: 

LITERARY LANDMARKS 

OF NEWARK, ETC. 

Cooper and Ir-ving Scenes— Hoboken — Sands— Bryant— Halleck — 
Neivark— The Gilders — Dr. Coles— Talleyrand— Chateau- 
briand— Shelley'' s Grandfather — Stephen Crane — Stedman 
— Mrs. Dodge — Marion Harland—Dr. Ward — Amanda 
M. Douglas— Mrs. Kinney — Noah Brooks— Thomas Dunn 
English — Thomas Moore— Cockloft Hall— Ray Palmer — 
Henry William Herbert^ etc. 

^ I ^HE water-ways that girt our ''mast hemmed 
,-*- Manhattan" have long been famed in song 
and story, and all the outlying district that environs 
the metropolis holds, for the literary prowler, objects 
and places of precious pilgrimage and regard. Some 
of these have earlier attracted our steps and have 
been sketched in previous books of this series, but 
more remain to reward our reverent quest. The 
noble harbor — fitting portal to a commerical capital — 
encircles with its tides the island which has been the 
abode of Thoreau and of our American Elia, George 
William Curtis, and is still the home of that gifted 
poet and critic, William Winter. James Fenimore 
Cooper here laid a scene of his ''Water Witch"; 
the adjacent water was the theater of some of the 
exploits of that marvelous craft and upon the near-by 
New Jersey coast we may find the site of Van 
Beverout's villa " Lust in Rust," with its superb sea- 

39 



Literary Rambles 

view, the place of "La Belle Barberie's*' pavilion, 
and contiguous scenes of the operations of the smug- 
glers in Cooper's tale. 

Other Jersey shrines may w^ell engage us. The 
river ferry-boats convey us quickly from the city's 
shore of ships to the ancient Pavonia of Diedrich 
Knickerbocker' s w^onderful * * History ' ' and to Com- 
munipaw, — scene of the victory of the Goede 
Vrouw heroes over the squawks and papooses, in 
that veracious chronicle, — the place which ** was the 
egg whence was hatched the mighty City of New 
York. ' ' Malodorous vapors from factories and refi- 
neries have replaced the clouds from the burghers' 
pipes which overhung the Communipaw of Knicker- 
bocker' s time, and that renowned spot has since been 
made the scene of an irreverent <* Legend" by 
George Arnold. 

Above lies historic Hoboken — with its sometime 
*' Elysian Fields" — where yet is indicated the old 
dwelling near the river where lived and died the 
poet of **Yamoyden" and author of many now 
little read works, Robert C. Sands. The course of 
domicihary decline has thus far spared the ample 
rooms, with their high ceilings and quaint mantels, 
and we may yet see the apartment in which the 
Sketch Club — that association of literary men and 
artists which was the parent of the Century Club — 
held many of its meetings, and the study where 

40 



Haunts of Bryant, Verplanck, Sands 

Sands, Bryant, and Verplanck collaborated upon 
*<The Talisman,'* their sessions being sometimes 
so noisily merry that passers-by would pause to 
listen. In this room, too, only three days after the 
publication of his poem, **The Dead of Thirty- 
two" (Scott, Cuvier, Goethe, Crabbe, Bentham, 
etc.). Sands was himself stricken while preparing an 
article for the first number of the Knickerbocker 
Magazine ; he had written the line, 

*' Oh, deem not my spirit among you abides," 

when the bolt fell, his pencil traced an irregular 
mark across the page, and then fell from his nerve- 
less grasp forever. The little cottage by the Sands 
mansion, which Bryant occupied during the preva- 
lence of the cholera in New York and for some 
years afterward, was long ago swept away by the 
current of commerce, and with it have disappeared 
the beauties of foliage-fi-inged shore, sunny mead, 
and rocky height, which were here celebrated in 
the musical verse of Halleck and Sands, and the re- 
fined prose of Verplanck and Irving. Not far fi-om 
the river we see the pleasant httle park described 
by Arthur Fawcett, where, in his ** Daughter of 
Silence," Brenda and Guy Arbuthnot first spoke. 

Out of the great salt meadows behind the near 
Bergen ridge rises the mound of Snake Hill — occu- 
pied now by various charitable and punitive institu- 

41 



Literary Rambles 

tions — which, according to Knickerbocker, was 
formed by the sepulture of the savages of Communi- 
paw, who, being accosted by the crew of the Goede 
FrouzUy were so terrified by the ** uncouth sound of 
the Low Dutch language that they one and all took 
to their heels, scampered over the Bergen hills, and 
did not stop until they had buried themselves, head 
and ears, in the marshes on the other side, where 
they all miserably perished. ' ' Across these meadows 
extends the Newark causeway of <* Salmagundi,'' 
along which Irving and his coterie of **Nine 
Worthies" made their frequent stage-journeys to 
the scene of their frolics at Cockloft Hall — the 
causeway which always reminded Paulding of 
Christopher Cockloft's stories, because **one sees 
the end at the distance of several miles." 

These ** several miles" bring us to the commer- 
cial center of the beautiful city of Newark, at which 
point we find the offices of the Daily Advertiser 
— the newspaper of which Noah Brooks long was 
editor, and upon whose stalF the Gilders and Stephen 
Crane were sometime employed. Upon the oppo- 
site corner of Broad and Market Streets Richard 
Watson Gilder established and edited the now de- 
funct Morni?ig Register , which was subsequently 
edited by Dr. English. To its columns all the 
Gilder family contributed; Miss Jeanette — now 
"The Lounger" of The Critic — wrote for it, 

42 



Newark Journals — Dr. Coles 

at an early age, her first newspaper article, an essay 
upon salt, for which, as she says, * * the encyclopedia 
suppHed most of the facts." A few rods down 
Market Street from this busy corner is published 
a successor to Gilder's Register y The Evening 
NewSy to which Dr. English is a contributor. Op- 
posite to the Evening News office we find, at 
No. 2 2 2, a venerable, three-storied, brick-and- 
stone building, now surrendered to business, which 
was long the home of the poet and scholar — friend 
of Whittier and Holmes — Dr. Abraham Coles. 
Here, amid the din of a noisy thoroughfare, and in 
the precarious leisure hours afforded by his high 
priesthood of the art of healing, he made most of his 
many rhythmic renderings of the solemn litany, 
**Dies Irse," some of which are matchless in spirit 
and manner, and preserve the sonorous quality of 
the original Latin in a degree unequalled by the 
version of any other translator; here, too, he made 
his beautifril translations of the **Stabat Mater" and 
many mediseval lyrics, wrote *'The Microcosm," 
— a Lucretius-like poem upon the structure and 
functions of the human body, — **The Evangel," 
"Light of the World," and numerous other poems. 
Just south of the corner of Broad and Market 
Streets is the site of the quamt square church where 
George Whitefield once preached during the pas- 
torate of Aaron Burr — the parent and virtual first 

43 



Literary Rambles 

president of Princeton College — and where that 
now venerated institution was ultimately organized, 
and its first eight commencements held. A sub- 
stantial and elegant stone mansion, long ago dis- 
placed by business structures, which stood discreetly 
back from the sidewalk two or three rods below the 
next (William) street, was the home of President 
Burr, to which, after a courtship of three days, he 
brought as his wife the lovely and amiable daughter 
of the author of ** Edwards On The Will," and 
here was born the Aaron Burr who fills so large a 
place in the pages of American history. 

Almost directly opposite to Burr's birthplace, 
and upon the site now occupied by the Kremhn 
Building, stood the Ailing homestead, — a commo- 
dious, massive-timbered, gambrel-roofed, low-ceiled 
edifice of wood, with a chair factory in one end and 
a railed gallery between its large chimneys, — which 
was long a landmark in its neighborhood, but which 
interests us mainly by its associations with some for- 
eign literators who sometime resided beneath its 
ancient roof. Among these was Talleyrand — 
Charles Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand- Perigord, 
Bishop of Autun — who dwelt here during the greater 
part of his term of exile in America; here he gave 
lessons in the French language, and sometimes 
worked at chair-making, and here were recorded 
the observations upon which he founded his disser- 

44 



Talleyrand — Chateaubriand — Shelley 

tation, '*Une Memoire sur les Relations Commer- 
ciales des Etats Unis," which he afterward pubUshed 
in France. In this old house, too, dwelt for a time 
that transcendent author, the Viscount de Chateau- 
briand, and here, it is said, he planned one of his 
most impressive works, ** Genie du Christianisme, " 
which he wrote in a London attic, and published 
in Paris. It has been thought that Edgar Allan Poe 
found in a chapter of this book the conceptions which 
he clothed in the musical rhyme of *'The Bells." 
In this older part of the city sometime hved 
Bysshe Shelley, who afterward removed to Eng- 
land to become Sir Bysshe of Goring Castle, Sussex, 
and grandfather of the ** impassioned Ariel of Eng- 
lish verse." Whether he was born in the then 
staid little town on the Passaic or was early brought 
hither from Guildford, Connecticut, where his 
parents inhabited the place afterward occupied by 
the poet Halleck, is a matter of incertitude ; in 
Newark he was reared and grew to be the tall, 
handsome, clear- witted, vigorous-willed man, stately 
of bearing, charming of address and "reckless of 
the proprieties," who was destined to elsewhere 
win his way to a baronetcy and a colossal fortune. 
Here he made his first essay in life as a medical 
charlatan, with so little success that the effort was 
not long continued, and here, probably, he was 
married to and — as his poet-grandson says — 

45 



Literary Rambles 

"behaved badly" toward the first of his procession 
of wives, the young widow of a miller. 

Among the quieter thoroughfares, a block or two 
out of Broad, Hes Mulberry Place, a short street of 
rather cheap and unpretentious dwellings, where we 
find the plain, three-storied brick house, now num- 
bered fourteen, in which Stephen Crane first saw the 
light and where some years of his childhood were 
spent. Less than three decades after his birth in 
this humble home, the author of **The Red Badge 
of Courage," to whom friendly critics were looking 
for the production of the great American novel, 
was brought fi-om a foreign land for burial a few 
miles distant fi-om this birthplace. A little way 
beyond Mulberry Place, in a tranquil neighbor- 
hood on shady Brunswick Street, is the dwelling 
where lived for several years the poet of "The 
Celestial Passion ' ' — now the editor of The 
Century — and other members of his talented 
family. The house is numbered seventy-seven, a 
modest and pleasant fi"ame fabric with a French 
roof, and is unaltered since the time of the Gilders' 
occupancy. Here, in addition to much routine 
editorial work, the poet produced some of that ex- 
quisite verse for which he is known and loved, 
and here began Miss Gilder's ** Journalistic Ex- 
periences" of which she has written with such 
spirit. 

The poet-banker, Edmund Clarence Stedman, 

46 



Stephen Crane — Gilder — Stedman 

dwelt a furlong or so from the Gilders. His home 
was erected in Stratford Place, a beautifully shaded 
little street on the eastern slope of the eminence 
upon which the more elevated portion of the city is 
set. The dwelling is a picturesque frame cottage 
of moderate size, with pretty porches and bay 
windows, and has recently been removed to Avon 
Avenue, — where it is numbered fifty-three, — a few 
rods from its original site. Upon that site it was 
a fit home for a poet, being garlanded by roses and 
climbing vines and placed in the midst of a garden 
where shrubbery and embowering trees grew about 
it on every side. In this home, mostly in the 
nights between wearying business days, Stedman 
wrote many of his charming poems and essays and 
a part of his appreciative and critical volume on 
'*The Victorian Poets" ; to him here came as 
visitors Dr. Coles, Mary Mapes Dodge, the Gilders, 
Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard and others 
of like tastes or attainments. 

The home of the historian Foster adjoined Sted- 
man' s on the south, and a mile without the city 
limits in this direction is the fine old mansion of 
the late Professor Mapes, where his gifted daughter, 
Mary Mapes Dodge, spent much of her girlhood 
and several years of her womanhood. While resi- 
dent here she commenced her editorial career on 
the Hearth and Home and wrote three or four books, 
including her best known volume, *' Hans Brinker." 

47 



Literary Rambles 

Northward, along the slope which once held the 
home of Stedman, we find in High Street, just back 
of the court house, a double frame dwelling of 
ample proportions where for six years resided that 
popular writer, Marion Harland (Mrs. Terhune), 
and where she produced ** My Little Love,'* 
** Common Sense in the Household," etc. 

The course of a stroll northward along Broad 
Street fi-om the business center of the city will bring 
us to some of the scenes and shrines we seek. The 
Park House, which overlooks Military Park fi-om 
its eastern border, was for years the abode of Eliza- 
beth Clementine Kinney, the intimate fi-iend of the 
Brownings, with whom she spent much time in 
Florence. She was the author of such works as 
**Felicita," ''The Italian Beggar Boy" and ''Bi- 
anca Capello," and here in the Park House she 
composed some of her poems and many journalistic 
articles. Her writings deserved the generous recog- 
nition they received, but her best contribution to 
literature was, undoubtedly, her son, the poet Sted- 
man. In this hostelry ** Frank Forester" some- 
time resided and wrote once famihar books on sports. 

In the dwelling adjoining the Park House 
Marion Harland produced *'At Last," and "True 
as Steel," and six or seven of her novels were 
written in the house No. 4 West Park Street, on 

48 



Marion Harland — Thomas D. English 

the opposite side of the park. Towering above a 
corner of Washington Park, at Lombardy Street, is 
the mammoth Aldine apartment house where Noah 
Brooks once hved. His were pleasant apartments 
upon the fourth floor, which he occupied during 
several years of his editorial connection with the 
Advertiser, and in which he produced his **Life 
of Lincoln" in the ** Heroes of the Nation" 
series, "Boy Settlers," and a volume of his con- 
tinuation of Bryant's *« History of the United 
States." Ward's colossal bronze of Coles, the 
unequaled translator of ** Dies Irse," stands at an- 
other corner of this green and shady park. 

A little way out of Broad in State Street — a 
sober, democratic thoroughfare north of the Lacka- 
wanna railway — stands a substantial brick house of 
modest exterior, within whose hospitable doors we 
are greeted by that veteran poet, dramatist, nov- 
elist, essayist, editor, critic. Dr. Thomas Dunn 
English. The rooms abound with interesting and 
valuable curios and with mementos of the friends 
and events of his long Hterary Hfe, but it is the 
back parlor — his library and lounge — which at- 
tracts and holds us. Its walls are mostly lined with 
well-used books ; wherever space permits pictures 
are hung, some of them painted by the doctor's 
own hand; bits of bric-a-brac and tasteful pieces of 
pottery are disposed here and there, smokers' arti- 
D 49 



Literary Rambles 

cles mingle with the books upon the writing-table, 
an orderly disorder of journals and papers over- 
spreads tables and chairs, and beside the fireplace 
sits, with long-stemmed pipe in mouth, the genius 
of the place — one of the most picturesque figures 
in our literature. His spare, lithe form is some- 
what bent, and the hair that crowns his finely 
formed head is touched with gray, but his face — 
mustached Hke a pirate's — is bright and expres- 
sive, the gleam in his dark eyes gives little hint of 
the malady that is dimming them to blindness, his 
mien is alert and animated, his thought is of the 
present not of the past, and yet it is nearly sixty 
years since he wrote **Ben Bolt," the lyric which 
took the world by storm. Nor is there any sign of 
mental senility in the virile verse, or the crisp and 
vigorous prose he produces, for he is still engaged 
in literary work. From the depths of his easy- 
chair he dictates to his daughter poems, editorials, 
and magazine articles which are widely read. Some 
of the latter are reminiscential in character and may, 
later, be collected in a volume. 

All of Dr. English's numerous published books 
were written before he came to this residence; the 
greater part of them were issued pseudonymously 
and have never been acknowledged by their author. 
Among the few novels he cares to recognize are 
"Ambrose Fecit" and "Walter Woolfe" — 

50 



Dr. English's Home and Works 

written before most of us were born ; a later suc- 
cessful tale, "Jacob Schuyler's Millions," was 
composed in an old house which we lately found 
standing by the corner of Sussex Avenue and Third 
Street, not far from the spot where ** Frank For- 
ester'* once fought a duel with a Newark lawyer. 
More recently a collection of Dr. English's ** Fairy 
Stories and Wonder Tales ' ' has been made by his 
daughter. 

Of his many dramas, composed mostly for Burton 
and Foster, only **The Mormons," which was 
written in three days, is now extant. Of the thou- 
sand and more poems that have been published under 
his own name some hundreds are preserved in the 
volumes * 'American Ballads," *« Battle Lyrics," and 
''Select Poems," and, among them all, few can be 
found which, in the esteem of their writer, are not 
superior in literary merit to the popular song with 
which his name is indissolubly associated. Such 
poems as ''The Charge by the Ford," "PaUng- 
enesia," "The Battle of Monmouth," "The Sack 
ofDeerfield," '* Ballad of the Colors," "Rafting 
on Guyandotte" (a vivid descriptive versification), 
or any one of a hundred others more worthily repre- 
sent his style and uphold his fame than does the 
perennial "Ben Bolt." Of the latter the doctor 
usually speaks as one of his "youthful indiscre- 
tions," and it is said to be sometimes perilous to 

51 



Literary Rambles 

mention it in his presence ; but we are favored with 
a whimsical account from his own lips of its 
hasty and fragmentary composition as a gift of 
**copy" for his friend Willis, of its being sent 
with the recommendation that it should be burned, 
of its unexpected and phenomenal success. **It 
became the rage ; a race-horse was named for it, 
a ship and steamboat took their name from it.'* 
The ship was wrecked, the steamboat exploded, the 
horse ruined all who risked their money upon 
him, but the ballad remains to be "the plague" of 
its author's life. He is everywhere pointed out as 
<*the man who wrote *Ben Bolt,'" bands play 
the air when he appears at any public function, ad- 
mirers in all quarters of the globe pester him with 
demands for autograph copies. Occasionally these 
annoyances abate somewhat, but before the doctor 
dares to hope the song is being forgotten something 
occurs — like its introduction by Cable in **Dr. 
Sevier" or by Du Maurier in ''Trilby" — to re- 
vive and extend its vogue. 

The vast aggregate of his literary productions 
suggests such unwonted celerity of composition that 
we are not surprised when told that many of his 
poems of a himdred lines were written in a single 
evening and that * * Kallimais, " a weird tale told in 
above five hundred lines of blank verse, was com- 
posed in five hours. The doctor has known, more 

52 



"Ben Bolt" — Thomas Moore 

or less intimately, many of the best American writers 
of the past half century, and to sit with him here 
among his books and listen to his brilliant discourse 
concerning our favorite authors, his earnest and 
enthusiastic appreciations of their best works, his 
vivid narratives of events in their lives, of which the 
biographers seem never to have heard, is for us an 
unparalleled pleasure. His mernory is a veritable 
treasure-house, and the "Reminiscences" he hopes 
— barring the interruption of death, which may 
Heaven forefend — to give to the world will be of 
transcendent interest and value. 

Two blocks beyond, by the junction of Belleville 
Avenue with Broad Street, we find a feed-store and 
the adjacent sidewalk covering now the site of the 
venerable mansion where the poet of " Lalla Rookh ' ' 
was once a guest. It was a substantial, low-built, 
square structure of stuccoed stone, with a broad 
front looking southward along the highway, and 
was occupied by the cultured Ogden family to 
whom, it is said, Moore brought letters of introduc- 
tion from their Tory relatives. The poet was then 
upon his return from **the vex't Bermoothes, ' * 
having assigned to a deputy the duties of his office 
there as Registrar of the Admiralty. Letters which 
he wrote from "the States " at this time stigmatized 
Americans as barbarous, sordid, corrupt, barren in 
intellect, taste, "and all in which the heart is con- 

53 



Literary Rambles 

cerned ' ' ; yet he graciously excepted from his 
denunciations the women, who, *'as flowers, here 
waste their sweetness most deplorably," and it has 
been said that one of his love-lyrics, 

*' Come o'er the sea, Maiden, with me," 

was addressed to a fair inmate of this old Ogden 
house. While here Moore seems to have called 
upon *'The Three Graces," daughters of a Mr. 
Lawrence who lived not far distant, and although 
he averred that ''music here is Hke whistling in the 
wilderness," he sang for these ladies some of his 
own sentimental songs, being accompanied upon 
"the first piano ever owned in the place." From 
the Ogden house Moore made the excursion to 
Passaic Falls, whence he wrote to his mother one of 
his habitually defamatory letters concerning Ameri- 
cans. Sixteen years afterward he expressed to 
Washington Irving his sorrow over these epistles 
from America, the production of which he pro- 
nounced *'the sin of his early life." On account 
of the defalcation of his Bermuda delegate, Moore 
was then in exile in Paris, where he become intimate 
with Irving, who danced with «*Bessie" on the 
tenth anniversary of her marriage to the poet. The 
* 'Bermuda difficulty" was settled from the proceeds 
of the sale by Moore of the famous Byron 
"Memoirs." 

54 



Resort of Irving — The Salmagundians 

It was not many months after Moore's visit to 
the Ogden house that Irving began to frequent the 
imposing old mansion which then stood nearest to 
it on the north, and which subsequently was cele- 
brated as the Cockloft Hall of "Salmagundi." 
This mansion still exists in a neighborhood which 
has greatly changed since Irving' s time, when the 
Hall was **not so near town as to invite an inun- 
dation of idle acquaintance, nor so distant as to ren- 
der it a deed of charity to perform the journey ' ' ; 
the growth of the city has swept far past it, and 
blocks of buildings cover now the fair fields which 
erst environed it. In the "Salmagundi" days it 
was owned by Gouverneur Kemble, and was the 
resort of a circle of choice spirits, wits and litt/ra- 
teurs of the time, variously known as **The An- 
cients," "Lads of Kilkenny,'* and "The Nine 
Worthies.'* This coterie included, among others, 
Washington Irving, Peter Irving ("The Doctor"), 
Kemble (**The Patroon"), James K. Paulding 
(** Billy Taylor"), Henry Ogden, and they would 
frequently come out from New York and make the 
old place gay with their froHcsome pranks. Here 
the humorous and satirical ** Salmagundi" papers 
were planned and partly written, and the mansion 
and its whimsical occupants figure conspicuously in 
their pages. 

We find the storied hall standing in the midst of 

55 



Literary Rambles 

ample lawns on Mount Pleasant Avenue. A few 
of the near-by elms and sycamores are survivors of 
the Cockloft period, but Christopher's sacred cherry- 
tree, — called Paulding's tree by the Salmagundians, 
because of a droll experience of the author of **The 
Dutchman' s Fireside ' ' among its branches, — which 
stood at the northwest corner of the house, was re- 
moved not many years ago. The tree, **full of 
fantastical twists," which was Launcelot Langstaff's 
lounging-place, has disappeared from the eastern 
lawn, and a railway traverses now the site of the 
Cockloft fish-pond and of the famous summer-house 
where Irving mused and wrote. That interesting 
structure — an elaborate octagonal edifice of Dutch 
bricks — was demolished in the extension of a 
street, and some of its materials are to be found 
in the foundation walls of a dwelling within a 
stone' s-throw of its ancient site. The mansion 
itself has been renovated and modernized until 
Pindar Cockloft would scarcely recognize his an- 
cestral abode ; but it retains its wooden walls in 
their original form and dimensions, and its chief 
essential alteration is the exchange of a gracefiil 
mansard for the hipped roof, with its surmounting 
gallery, which Irving knew. The interior has 
lost the antique fiirniture and family portraits, to- 
gether with the heavy oaken wainscots and cornices 
of the olden time, and its decorations and furnish- 

56 



Cockloft Hall 

ings are now those of a tasteful and elegant modern 
home. A drawing-room of regal dimensions, on 
the eastern front, was the "Chinese Saloon*' in 
** Salmagundi " days, where **The Nine'* in- 
dulged in some of their absurd pranks, ''of which 
games of leap-frog were the least." From the 
windows of this apartment we look across the rem- 
nant of the ancient lawn to the river — bordered 
now by docks and lumber-yards, which replace the 
fringing willows Irving described — and see upon 
the farther shore the tower of Kearny's castle rising 
among the trees not far from the birthplace of 
** Major Jack Downing." 

With the drawing-room an extension is united at 
either end, forming a noble suite of three rooms, of 
which the northern is — as it was of yore — the 
library of the mansion. Here Christopher Cockloft 
preserved the «*most quaint and insufferable books 
in the whole compass of English, Scotch, and Irish 
literature"; here Will Wizard persued his anti- 
quarian studies and discovered the wonderflil 
''Chronicles of the Renowned and Ancient City 
of Gotham," which appeared in ** Salmagundi " 
and anticipated the humor and style of ** Knicker- 
bocker's History"; here may now be seen articles 
made from Paulding's cherry-tree and a ledger in 
the handwriting of the ancient owner of the place. 
The ** Green Moreen" chamber — beloved of the 

57 



Literary Rambles 

Salmagundians, who lay here in bed and, through 
the window, shot cherries from Paulding's tree — 
is the southwestern room of the second floor, and 
has long since parted with its distinctive furniture 
and hangings. 

Some of Irving' s contributions to ** Salmagundi " 
were scarcely excelled by the later productions of 
his graceful pen. One of his family has told this 
writer that Irving once designed to extend the 
Cockloft papers by making Will Wizard marry 
Miss Cockloft, and describing a whimsically cere- 
monious wedding at the venerable hall. Through 
all the successes of their subsequent lives the Salma- 
gundians retained fond recollections of this place and 
of the happy days passed here. Many years after- 
ward Paulding — author of twenty-seven successfiil 
books and member of Van Buren' s cabinet — wrote 
of the old hall in terms of affectionate regard ; 
Kemble, in a letter to Irving in Europe, said : 
** Cockloft Hall is still mine: I look forward to the 
time when we shall assemble there, recount the 
stories of our various lives, and have another game 
of leap-frog ;" and, not long before his death, we 
find Irving recalling his pleasant memories of the 
place, and asking of Kemble, in allusion to their 
merry frolics here, ** Who would have thought we 
should ever have lived to be such respectable old 
gentlemen ! " 

58 



Ray Palmer — H. Ward — Miss Douglas 

Directly opposite to Cockloft Hall, on tree- 
shaded Mount Pleasant Avenue, is a modest and 
comfortable frame dwelling where Uved and died 
Ray Palmer, writer of America's best contribution 
to Christian hymnology, '* My Faith Looks up to 
Thee." Here many of his sacred lyrics were 
composed and here now dwell surviving members 
of his family. Upon the sightly summit of the 
neighboring Mount Prospect is the abode of Dr. 
William Hayes Ward ; it is a handsome brownstone 
structure with a delightful environment of sward, 
shrub, and tree, and with a wide and beautiful prospect 
extending to the tree-crowned top of the Watchung 
range. For above a quarter of a century this has 
been the home of the veteran editor of The In- 
dependent and his gifted sister. Miss Susan Hayes 
Ward, who have here performed much literary 
work ; here, too, lived Herbert D. Ward before 
he married Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and became the 
hero of his story of "The Burglar that Moved 
Paradise." 

On the lower slope of this elevation of Mount 
Prospect lies Summer Avenue, and the residence of 
that ready and prolific writer. Miss Amanda M. 
Douglas. Hers is an attractive frame dwelling, 
whose windows face the sunset ; a pleasant front 
room of the second story, literally "glorified" by 
large, sunny windows, is the apartment especially 

59 



Literary Rambles 

favored by Miss Douglas. Well-filled bookcases 
partially cover its walls, here and. there are taste- 
ful pictures and articles of bric-a-brac, and every- 
where is a profusion of books, magazines, and 
papers. In a cozy corner beside the brightest 
window stands a little desk, and here, seated in a 
rocking-chair which ''fits her well," the author of 
*«In Trust" works during some hours of most 
days and during all hours of some days upon her 
manuscripts. In Summer Avenue she has written 
many volumes, embracing all of the ''Sherburne'* 
books, and the popular historical series fi-om "A 
Little Girl in Old New York," to "A Little 
Girl in Old Washington." "In Wild- Rose 
Time," which Miss Douglas considers her best 
novel, was written just before she removed to this 
place. 

Mount Prospect overlooks the solitude of "The 
Cedars," where the brilHant and unhappy Henry 
William Herbert passed his last years of life. 
It is a weird and romantic spot near the river-bank 
at the northeast corner of Mount Pleasant Ceme- 
tery, selected by Herbert because, as he said, the 
living were distant and the dead would not molest 
him. In this place he erected a quaint, gabled 
cottage, above whose entrance he carved the arms 
of the high-born English family to which he be- 
longed ; and, relinquishing journalism, he with- 

60 



Herbert at "The Cedars" 

drew to this retreat and devoted nearly twelve 
years of almost hermit-like seclusion to beloved 
literary occupations. Here he wrote twenty-three 
of his more than a hundred books and partially 
completed others, including a spirited translation of 
Homer's ''Iliad." Many of these books were 
once widely read novels, — of which ** Cromwell" 
was one of the best, — but nine of those produced 
in this retirement treated of field sports and were 
published under the yet popular name of ** Frank 
Forester. ' ' 

To this homelet, in his last fateful year, he 
brought a bride who left him three months later, 
and whose final refusal to return produced the men- 
tal agony which impelled him to write, "All is lost, 
— home, hope, sunshine, she, — let life go likewise," 
and to cast himself uncalled into the arms of death. 

A few visitors, like Anton, Picton, and the poet, 
Isaac McLellan, came to Herbert here ; a more 
frequent caller was an unlettered Enghsh farmer 
living a half mile distant, Mr. I' Anson, to whom 
Herbert was greatly attached, and to whom he 
wrote the day before his suicide begging for burial 
in his cemetery plot. I' Anson's house, which 
the author often visited, is still standing, and mem- 
bers of his family, who cherish sympathetic mem- 
ories of Herbert, reside in the vicinage. By their 
direction we trace the site of his hermitage beneath 

6i 



Literary Rambles 

the dark evergreens that embosomed it, we find the 
trees he rooted, the course of his path across the 
cemetery to the highway, the spot where he last 
parted with his wife and where he designed to end 
his own wretched existence. 

Not far from this spot, in the center of the 
cemetery for whose dedication he wrote the ode 
and where he often strolled as he planned his com- 
positions, he rests in the refuge he sought. Sol- 
emnly observing every wish expressed by poor 
Herbert in that last pathetic letter to his neighbor, 
the faithful I' Anson and a silent, sorrowful group 
of friends laid the wounded body here in the loving 
lap of earth without a word of priestly prayer or bene- 
diction. Eighteen years afterward a belated orison 
was uttered above him, and the local Herbert Asso- 
ciation erected the simple slab that marks his grave. 
A relative of his, Mrs. Margaret Herbert Mathers, 
— herself the writer of many graceful sketches, — 
planted upon the mound ivy brought from the seat 
of the noble English family from which he was de- 
scended, and this has grown until grave and stone 
are thickly mantled with the dark foliage, save 
where a loving hand keeps it trimmed away to 
show the inscription dictated by Herbert to his 
friend, the simplest record of his years and the 
one expressive word, "Infelicissimus." 

In the shade and quiet of the place all things 
62 



Herbert's Grave 

breathe of the rest and "surcease of sorrow" he 
risked so much to gain. About him are the scenes 
he loved and haunted ; swaying boughs bend above 
his bed, a near-by pine sighs in the summer wind, 
and, in many a leafy covert, birds sing for him the 
requiem which man refused. 



63 



WHERE STOCKTON WROTE 
HIS STORIES 

Rutherford Home - Scenes of Rudder Grange — Pomona — Other 
Characters — The Holty Madison — Auihorh Workshop — 
Historic Morristoivn and its Writers — F'irginia Scenes of 
Fiction — Mrs. Null — Ardis Clanger den^ etc . — Stockton" s 
Present Home — Study — Con'versations — Method of Liter- 
ary Work — Solutions of ** The Lady or the Tiger f'' etc. 

T X TE may fitly begin the present ramble at the 
^ * place where the previous ramble ended, the 
shaded bank of the Passaic where, by the site of his 
ruined home, poor Henry William Herbert sleeps 
in a suicide's grave while his own ** Cedars" whis- 
per above him of the silence and mystery. 

Above Newark the once **pure and pellucid 
streme" is bordered by trees beneath which a 
pleasant highway follows the curving river-bank and 
brings us to the pretty, park-like town of Ruther- 
ford and to scenes of Frank R. Stockton's life and 
work. The ''Roundabout Rambles," the "Ting- 
a-ling," and other minor stories had been written 
and much editorial work had been wrought by him 
before he came to this place, but it was here that 
his phenomenally successful literary career really be- 
gan with that first — and perhaps best — distinc- 
tively Stocktonese story, ** Rudder Grange," whose 
scenes and characters he found in and about his 
Rutherford home. 

64 



Stockton's Rutherford Cottage 

His quondam abode here is now numbered one 
hundred and ninety-two Passaic Avenue, and stands, 
practically unchanged since his occupancy, upon a 
green, shaded slope which falls away toward the 
river and the sunset. It is a pleasant and pic- 
turesque frame cottage of two stories, with pretty 
porches and bay-windows, and cozy rooms whose 
western casements afford us an enchanting prospect. 
We look down a long decline to the fringe of over- 
hanging trees that conceals the river, and see, rising 
from its farther margin, a mild acclivity checkered 
with verdant fields that stretch away to the darker 
woodlands, above which mounts distant Watchung, 
its wooded ridge indented by the historic Great 
Notch. Between us and the far mountain lies 
Montclair, where dwelt John Habberton when he 
wrote '* Helen's Babies," and Nutley, where 
Henry C. Bunner lived and produced delightful 
poems and books. At Nutley, too, Hved Mr. 
Stockton's friend, for whose evening party the dis- 
tractftil story of ''The Lady or the Tiger?" was 
originally designed. 

The Stockton cottage is placed in the midst of a 
greensward dotted here and there with shrubbery 
and broken by the flower-beds which the German 
servant- girl of ** Rudder Grange" decorated with 
the border of ham-bones with flower seeds planted 
in their marrow cavities. By the roadside is more 

E 65 



Literary Rambles 

/ 

than one tree that might have borne the cabalistic 
inscription which frightened away the tramps ; and 
upon the lawn, before and beside the cottage, are 
dark evergreens and other tall trees that stood here 
in Mr. Stockton's day, among which we may 
make our choice — it will not be disputed — of the 
one in which the dog. Lord Edward, ** treed" the 
tree-man. With the same freedom may we locate 
for ourselves, in the clear space behind the dwelling, 
the arena of the dog-fight — instigated by Pomona 
and witnessed by the **'Piscopal minister" — 
which m.ade the male Rudder Granger a church 
vestryman. Other scenes, Hke the site of the 
summer camp of the Ardens, — afterward occupied 
by the ex-boarder, — are not far away, and a stroll 
along the shady river-bank will sometimes discover 
the remains of more than one canal-boat which may 
have been the prototype of the first ** Rudder 
Grange," since, for the purposes of the tale, Mr. 
Stockton transferred that famous craft from the 
Harlem River to the neighborhood of his home. 

Most of the characters of that inimitably hum.or- 
ous story may be identified more definitely, being, 
even to the rascally old John, persons whom the 
author observed at Rutherford. 

The unique Pomona who figures so prominently 
in the tale was a maid-of-all-work here in the 
Stockton household. She was procured from a 

66 



Characters of "Rudder Grange" 

charitable institution of New York and bore in real 
life a name so absurdly romantic that it must have 
been assumed. This hand-maiden had in her men- 
tal composition the same odd combination of the 
practical with the sentimental which is attributed to 
Pomona^ and with it all of Pomona's eccentricities, 
including her habit of reading to herself, in distinct 
syllables and very loud tones, the most harrowing 
tales of agony and blood. Other even less endura- 
ble peculiarities of hers caused the Stocktons to part 
with her after a' few months, and the subsequent 
career of the girl is more or less a matter of mys- 
tery, for in real life she did not marry Jonas and 
undergo all those irresistibly droll experiences which 
the author invents for her in his fiction. She 
thought herself to be a '*born actress," and Mr. 
Stockton has more than once led or left this present 
writer to infer that she went upon the stage, not 
* * to scrub the stage and work up by scrubbing the 
galleries," but to rise to eminence on more ambi- 
tious and remunerative histrionic hnes. Which of 
our successful actresses she is 7iot Mr. Stockton will 
readily tell us, but which she is has never been 
extorted from him. 

The German servant and the canine Lord Edward 
were actualities, and the character of **the boarder" 
was suggested by a veritable boarder who was the 
friend of the Stocktons and shared their home. 

67 



Literary Rambles 

The "nearest neighbor," who, in the story, 
lived ''within vigorous shouting distance" — he 
would not be the nearest now, for other dweUings 
have been erected closer by than his pleasant domi- 
cile — was the author's especial friend. Doctor 
Williams, with whom the Stocktons sojourned for a 
time after they had relinquished this cottage home. 
The little toddler — himself ** scarcely weaned be- 
fore he began to carry milk to other people ' ' — 
who served the Rudder Grangers with their accus- 
tomed ** lacteal pint" was also real, and came daily 
to the Stocktons' kitchen-door from a neighboring 
farm-house, which is now used by the Salvation 
Army as a children's home. The scheming old John 
was, not long ago, still living in the neighborhood. 

The vexatious incidents of the house-hunting, 
which are so humorously narrated in the first chap- 
ter of the story, were part of the actual experiences 
of Mr. Stockton and his wife in the quest which 
resulted in their taking the Rutherford cottage, and 
throughout the book, mingled with the quaint situa- 
tions and comical incidents, are vistas of a simple 
and happy domestic life which may easily have been 
the author's in this unpretentious home. 

It is noteworthy that this story of "Rudder 
Grange," which proved such an instant and com- 
plete success and gained for its author international 
fame, was "declined with thanks" by several pub- 

68 



"The Holt" 

lishers before one was found willing to take the 
risks of its publication. 

The slopes of yonder Watchung Mountain have 
been the retreat of many famed in literature or art, 
and in one home of lettered refinement upon its 
summit Hamilton W. Mabie sits by his '* Study 
Fire" or ** Under the Trees" to ponder and write 
his volumes of brilliant and scholarly essays ; the 
region beyond is the **hill country of New Jersey," 
— scene of *'The Great Stone of Sardis," — and 
there, near the head-waters of the stream which 
flows by his Rutherford cottage, we find a later 
home of Mr. Stockton. This home has been, more 
than any other, associated with his literary work 
and is therefore paramount in our interest and 
affection. 

From the western verge of an elevated plateau, 
midway between Madison and Morristown, a 
wooded promontory juts into the romantic valley 
of the Loantaka, and upon this eminence is set the 
mansion which, for a decade of years, held our 
author's Lares and Penates. The approach is by a 
broad avenue, shaded by tall elms and shapely 
maples, whence a driveway circles across .a lawn 
and among trees and shrubbery to the entrance 
door. 

The house is an ample and imposing structure . of 
wood of irregular design, with a fine portico in front 

69 



Literary Rambles 

and with balconies beneath its arched windows ; 
from one portion of the roof rises among the tree- 
tops a multi-storied square tower — erected for an 
observatory by a former owner. Professor Kitchell, 
of the State Geological Survey — which gave to the 
mansion the name of **The Tower House," by 
which it was locally known for forty years. This 
appellation was superseded by * ' The Holt ' ' (old 
Saxon for wooded hill), the name appropriately be- 
stowed by Stockton. Within, high-ceiled rooms 
of generous size flank upon either side a central hall — 
parlors upon the left, and a dining-room on the 
right. 

To the northwest corner of the mansion Stockton 
added the study; it is a spacious apartment, with 
panelled ceiling, and with windows that look out 
upon an entrancing landscape of green and golden 
fields and farther forest-clad hills — a prospect whose 
beauties surely must have sometimes allured the 
author's vision from the grotesque mental pictures 
that were being portrayed upon his page. The 
tiles beneath the study mantel bear this apt invo- 
cation, 

" Yee that frequent the Hilles and highest Holtes of All, 
Assist me with your skilful Quilles and listen when I call," 

which Stockton told us was discovered by Mary 
Mapes Dodge in the verse of quaint old Turberville 

70 



Stockton at "The Holt" 

and sent to **The Holt" several years ago. In 
this study were produced many of his thirty or more 
books — he never counted them — including, among 
others, "The House of Martha," *'The Squirrel 
Inn," "Pomona's Travels," "Adventures of 
Captain Horn," "The Girl at Cobhurst," "The 
Great Stone of Sardis," ** The Associate Hermits," 
and many minor stories and sketches. 

Of the tales written here, the scenes of only a 
few of the short ones are laid in the vicinage, ex- 
cepting only the marvelous " Great Stone of Sardis," 
which, in a general way, is located in this highland 
region of New Jersey. It has been said Stockton 
discovered the original of the sign of " The Squirrel 
Inn ' ' during one of his drives along a woodland 
road not far from this home, but that crooked 
hostelry is itself placed upon a different and distant 
site. 

Arthur B. Frost, the famous artist in black and 
white, who lives at the farther end of a path which 
leads across a field from **The Holt," was the 
illustrator of ** Rudder Grange," and it is believed 
that his own form is pictured as that of the male 
Rudder Granger. 

More than once was it our privilege to visit 
Stockton here in his study, to walk with him under 
the trees that crown the hilltop, or sit in converse 
with him upon the lawn while soft winds murmured 

71 



Literary Rambles 

in the foliage overhead^ and the air was caressed 
with song. From the smooth sward rise stately 
spruces which partially hide the mansion from the 
highway, and in the depths of their foliage are 
room-like recesses of summer shade and coolness, 
where hammocks and rustic seats tempted the 
loiterer to ** sweet doing-nothing." The hill falls 
away upon three sides, — as described by Stockton 
in *' My Terminal Moraine," — its slopes clothed 
with noble old forest trees, oaks, chestnuts, poplars, 
hickories, which are surviving members of the wood 
that once covered the country-side. Flowers and 
shrubs deck the grounds about the house ; a tall 
screen of evergreen conceals stable, orchard, and 
garden at the one side, and, by the farther margin 
of the lawn upon the other side^ a great oak — • 
called by the getiius loci the ** Corner Oak" — 
shades with its wide-spreading branches a rustic seat 
and a reach of velvet turf. Paths wind along the 
slope and among the trees, and lead to cozy retreats 
and sightly outlooks. 

Sweeping away in every direction to a far horizon 
of green hills is an expanse of field, orchard, and 
woodland, through which Mr. Stockton took his 
daily afternoon drive behind his favorite roadsters. 
Southward the long range of Watchung bounds a 
broad champaign, in another direction rise the loftier 
summits of the central highlands, and away in the 

72 



Morristown 

north are heights which look down upon the storied 
Ramapo. Yonder, in the middle-distance, lies his- 
toric Morristown, — described as "Marrowfat" by 
the author of *'Rutledge," who once lived and 
wrote there, — where we find the theater of one of 
Mr. Stockton's ** Stones of New Jersey " • there, 
too, we see the home of Thomas Nast and the 
sometime abode of Bret Harte, who laid the scenes 
of his story of *♦■ Thankful Blossom" in and around 
that delightful old town. 

Nearer, at the foot of Stockton's wooded hill, 
stretches the lovely valley of the Loantaka, with its 
pathetic memories of patriotic endurance and en- 
deavor ; just beyond the verdant ridge that borders 
the valley on the west is the ancient farm-house, 
**with its shaded yard and the great willow behind 
it," once the home of **Tempe Wick" and the 
scene of the occurrences upon which Stockton's 
story is founded, where we may yet see the back 
room in which the heroine secreted her steed to 
save it from the soldiery; and farther among these 
sunset hills is the home of John Gilmer Speed, the 
gifted grand-nephew of the poet of ''Endymion." 

Stockton has always loved Virginia, — the State 
which gave his mother birth and was the girlhood 
home of the lady who is now his wife, — and since 
his marriage he has made frequent and prolonged 

73 



Literary Rambles 

sojourns in that venerable Commonwealth, Not 
far from the banks of the historic Appomattox, in 
the black belt of southern Virginia, is Paineville, 
the home of Mrs. Stockton's relatives, and three 
miles away is Elmwood, the scene of several of 
Mr. Stockton's Southern stories. This old mansion 
figures in ''The Late Mrs. Null'' as the home of 
the heroine, Roberta March. An idea of the age 
of this ample edifice is given by the fact that a room 
which was added for the use of visitors is still called 
"the new room,'* although it was a hundred years 
old at the time of Stockton's long visit to the 
place. Upon its broad lawn a summer office, up- 
held by wooden piles, stands in the shade of tall 
trees, and this was the author's workshop during 
extended visits to the place. Here many of his 
stories, including ''The Lady or the Tiger?" were 
dictated to his wife, and many more — among them 
being his first novel, "The Late Mrs. Null" — 
were conceived and mentally elaborated to be 
written after his return to the North. 

In the vicinage of this homestead are laid the 
scenes of more than one incident of his tales : the 
hamlet of Paineville, three miles distant, figures as 
Akeville in "What Might Have Been Expected," 
Midbranch and other scenes of " The Late Mrs. 
Null ' ' were suggested to the author by places known 
to him here, and pictured with more or less dis- 

74 



Southern Scenes and Characters 

tinctness in his pages. Of the negro characters who 
appear in his stories of Southern Hfe most were 
drawn from the colored people in Paineville and at 
Elm wood. The Uncle Pete of ''A Story of Seven 
Devils ' ' was a real negro preacher ; the Grandison 
Pratt and Brother 'Bijah of " Grandison' s Quan- 
dary," the Aunt Judy of ''What Might Have Been 
Expected," the Plez, Peggy, Uncle Isham, and 
Aunt Patsy of "The Late Mrs. Null," Uncle 
Elijah of "The Cloveriields Carriage," as well as 
John William Webster, Brother Enoch, and the rest, 
are portraitures of persons then existent hereabout. 
Some individuals, hke Uncle Braddock and Aunt 
Matilda, wear in his fiction the names by which 
they were known in real life, and highly elated were 
they by the distinction thus conferred. 

A few of his white characters were more or less 
definitely suggested by persons the author met. 
Some of the incidents of his stories were actual 
occurrences in this neighborhood and were made 
known to him here : such, for instance, are the 
events of "A Story of Seven Devils" and "The 
Cloverfields Carriage ' ' ; while the incident of Mrs. 
Keswick's revenge never happened as it is narrated, 
something did occur so much like it as to suggest to 
the quick-witted author that astonishing episode. 

Among the outlying mountains near the eastern 
base of the Blue Ridge is another Virginia resort of 

IS 



Literary Rambles 

Stockton. Here, at a country-place, sometime a 
part of the estate of Jeiferson, who lived near by and 
gave to this seat the name of Lego, which it still 
bears, our author dwelt during five fruitful summers. 
His hosts were descendants of the illustrious writer 
of the Declaration of Independence, and the sym- 
metrical summit of Monticello, with its crown of 
foliage, is a pleasing feature of the broad and 
animating landscape. Miles of the green valley 
of the Rivanna are in view, low mountains and 
rounded hills cluster upon either hand, and on the 
western horizon the Ridge, a mighty wall, upholds 
the sky. 

The mansion in which Stockton sojourned was 
destroyed by fire a few years ago and its successor is 
built in different fashion, but the great trees, beneath 
which was his study in the summer days, remain 
upon the sward. Lying in his hammock here, with 
Mrs. Stockton seated near at a little table with quaint 
side-wings, that once was Jefferson's writing-stand, 
he recounted to her his humorous conceits, which 
she rapidly recorded. Here were written several 
short stories and the novel of ''Ardis Claverden," 
the scenes of which are found in this locality, — 
Bald Hill, the home of the bewitching heroine, 
Heatherley, the seat of the Crantons, and other 
scenes being pen pictures of places in this rolling 
region at the foot of the mountains. 

76 



Stockton's Present Home 

Near the stoned Shenandoah, at the western base 
of the Blue Ridge, in that picturesque region of 
West Virginia which ** Porte Crayon" — who lived 
in the adjoining county — loved to picture, lies Clay- 
mont, the present home of Stockton. Journeying up 
the historic valley, through which for five cruel years 
ebbed and flowed the tides of fratricidal war, we find 
two miles beyond Charles Town, where John Brown 
was executed, a driveway leading to the left fi*om the 
highroad; if we follow its curves for three quarters of a 
mile through a wide stretch of woodland, we come 
to the country-seat which is the object of our quest. 

It is set in the midst of an estate of three thousand 
acres, — once owned by Washington, — of which one 
hundred and fifty acres of diversified forest, lawn, 
and meadow are now the property of our fancifiil 
magician. The mansion, planned by Washington, 
erected by Washington's grand-nephew and named 
for a Washington hom stead in England, is a venerable 
structure of buff-colored brick, of ample and impos- 
ing proportions, built in the sedate colonial style. 
Dormer windows peep fi-om the roofs ; a tall tile- 
floored portico protects the northern entrance ; a 
glass-inclosed conservatory projects from the south ; 
a deep veranda shades the length of this front and, 
along the central part of the mansion, rises — two 
stories high — to the eaves. Smaller edifices, one 
utilized as an '* annex for visitors" and the other 

n 



Literary Rambles 

occupied by the servants of the family, stand at the 
eastern and western sides of the house and are con- 
nected with it by walls of brick, inclosing court- 
yards. The dwelling is pleasantly placed upon a slight 
elevation among romantic and inspiring scenes : on 
the north, only an undulating strip of sward separates 
it from grand old woods ; on the south, a wide lawn 
extends to terraced gardens, green pastures, and 
farther forests beyond which a great expanse of the 
beautiful valley is in view and many miles of the 
bordering mountain- chain, the Blue Ridge, visible 
in fine weather to the heights which overhang the 
Potomac at historic Harper's Ferry. 

The interior of the mansion more than fulfils 
the promise of its exterior. A hall of baronial 
proportions, lined with handsomely carven oaken 
panels, adjoins the entrance; opening out of this are 
the principal rooms — parlor, dining-room, library, 
all lofty and spacious apartments tastefully fitted 
and furnished. 

Adjoining the library is the study in which the 
creator of Sarah Block, Mrs. Leeks, Mrs. Aleshine 
and the procession of inimitable Stocktonian char- 
acters dictates the stories which delight the world of 
readers. Here the privileged visitor may sit with 
the master of the place — a quiet, mild-mannered man, 
slight of figure, vibrant of voice, strong yet mobile 
of face, with hair and mustache of iron gray, and 

78 



Stockton's Study 

with large, dark, luminous eyes that behold every- 
thing about them — responsive eyes that dance v\^ith 
merriment or deepen with feeling. 

The study in which his literary work is done is 
of all places the one most meet for a chat with the 
author concerning his books. It is a vast, cheerful, 
pleasantly flirnished apartment, occupying the west- 
ern end of the mansion. Its six great double windows 
look northward into the forest of oaks and southward 
far along the suimy valley. An open desk stands 
near one window and a large oval table holds a few 
volumes of reference, but there is little in the room to 
suggest the Uterary workshop. The usual disorder 
of manuscripts, papers, and books is conspicuously 
absent and we look in vain for some justification of 
the averment of a visitor that, while the touch of the 
lady is seen in the other apartments, the tiger evi- 
dently holds undisputed sway in the study : except 
for an array of unanswered letters upon the desk, 
this room is as orderly as any other in that well- 
ordered house. 

The bookcase in the study is mostly filled with 
the different editions of Stockton's own books, from 
"The Ting-a-ling Stories" to "The Vizier of the 
Two-Horned Alexander," including translations 
into several languages : of these, one cherished vol- 
ume is an Itahan version of **The Griffin and the 
Minor Canon," the work of a young lady spending 

79 



Literary Rambles 

a winter in Rome, who made the translation, en- 
grossed the whole book with her pen, illustrated it 
with spirited drawings, tastefully illuminated the 
initial capitals, and bound the volume in sumptuous 
old vellum as an offering to her favorite author. 
Among the curios upon the case are fantastic figures 
in flannel of the lady and the tiger — in this instance 
the lady is riding the tiger — and of Mrs. Leeks 
equipped for shipwreck with an umbrella and a 
metallic case of provisions, her features being delin- 
eated in sepia upon a facies of hickory -nut. Another 
grotesque image, a diminutive Japanese manikin that 
savagely thrusts a great sword when his spinal cord 
is pulled upon, was the gift of Mary L. Booth, 
the late editor of Harper's Bazar, and represents 
*'The Discourager of Hesitancy." A murderous- 
looking oriental blade, which lies conveniently near, 
is probably displayed with intent to intimidate the 
visitor who might be tempted to ask in person of 
the long-suffering author which it really was, **The 
Lady or the Tiger ? " It may be safer to discharge 
that perennial question at him at longer range and 
through the medium of the mails. 

In this study Stockton is, when at home, regularly 
engaged for about three hours of each morning. In 
his literary work he never writes with his own hand 
but dictates to a deft stenographer; when we men- 
tion, among the manifest advantages of this method 

80 



How Stockton Works 

his immunity from scrivener's paralysis, he exclaims 
in mock dismay, **But what if it should attack 
my jaw ? ' ' 

Seated here in the easiest of easy«-chairs, he nar- 
rates the first draft of his matchless stories, which 
usually — even to the conversations and the minutest 
details — have been constructed in his mind perhaps 
months before a word of them is written. Rarely 
there may be a question concerning some matter of 
the story, or a doubt as to the very best word to be 
employed, which must be duly deliberated and set- 
tled in the author' s mind before the dictation can be 
commenced or resumed, and, as **The Discourager 
of Hesitancy ' ' is not permitted to prompt his creator 
with the whispered **I am here," it sometimes 
happens that the stenographer has little or nothing 
in her note-book at the end of the session. Under 
favorable conditions fifteen hundred words is an 
average morning's work. From this first draft the 
copy for the printer is made by the secretary in an 
upper room of the house, whence the sharp clatter 
of the type-writer is inaudible to the household. 

Of all his humorous works the author most en- 
joyed writing *«The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks 
and Mrs. Aleshine." He sometime knew those 
delightfiil old ladies in the flesh, — they are both 
dead now, — and although in real life they never 
had any of the experiences imagined for them in 
F 8i 



Literary Rambles 

the story, they possessed, with the other quaint 
peculiarities described, the ultra-practical habit of 
mind which would prompt them to do just the 
things imputed to them in the tale if similarly cir- 
cumstanced. A majority of readers have preferred 
"Rudder Grange," if we may judge by the com- 
parative circulation of his books ; the phenomenal 
sales of ''The Late Mrs. Null," his first long 
novel, led for a time, but the popular demand for 
that book has not been so continuous and persistent 
as for the earlier favorite. 

Of the female characters of his fiction, Mr. 
Stockton confesses to an especial fondness for the 
racy and piquant ''Ardis Claverden." The long- 
sought type of this heroine was finally found in a 
famous American authoress of our day, who, suffi- 
ciently disguised, stood as the pattern : Ardis is a 
name hereditary in the family of the author' s mother, 
down in Virginia. 

The much discussed sketch, "The Lady or the 
Tiger ? ' ' which drove a host of readers to the 
brink of madness, was written nearly twenty years 
ago, but the epistolary and controversial conse- 
quences of that conundrum have occupied not a 
little of the author's time and attention ever since. 
Letters fi-om all sorts and conditions of people, de- 
manding or entreating private information as to 
which door the lover opened, have come in such 

82 



Was it "the Lady or the Tiger?" 

numbers that Mr. Stockton once contemplated hav- 
ing a printed answer prepared declaring that he had 
no idea himself which it was. Letters of inquiry 
are still received, but in diminished numbers, and 
usually from the second generation of readers of the 
perplexing problem. 

The correspondents who themselves gave an ex- 
press answer to the question were about evenly 
divided in opinion between the lady and the tiger ; 
it is notable that the poet Browning was among 
those who thought that the lady sent her lover to 
the tiger. Some of the solutions of the problem 
were fortified by pages of reasoning which had 
manifestly cost the writers much thought, and of 
the many and diverse extensions of the story sug- 
gested by correspondents the author tells us of not a 
few that are interesting and ingenious. According 
to one of these, the tiger during the preliminary 
proceedings of the tribunal broke into the compart- 
ment of the lady and devoured her; then, being 
gorged with his repast, he lazily walked out when 
his door was opened and lay down to sleep upon 
the sands of the arena. In another version the 
lady's door was opened and the young man was 
accordingly married to her, and speedily found in 
her temper and disposition the evidence that he had 
acquired both the lady and the tiger. A more fe- 
licitous termination is foreshadowed by still another 

Si 



Literary Rambles 

version in which the princess herself is secreted 
behind the door on the right, while a friend of 
hers, disguised in her robes, occupies her seat by 
the king's side, and by a movement of the hand to 
the right indicates to the lover which door he shall 
open. 

The location of Stockton's new home in this 
beautiful valley suggested the title of the superb 
library edition of his works recently pubUshed. 
Since his removal to Claymont, revising and read- 
ing proof for this Shenandoah edition have occupied 
much of his time, and he has also written several 
delightful short stories. As yet no completed book 
has been produced in this ideal retreat, but we may 
be assured that in other years he will here conjure 
additional Stocktonese personages, combinations, and 
plots, and produce more of those droll delineations 
of human character which, for his readers, make 
old earth a sunnier and happier abode, and which 
''will outlive a thousand laughs, because fun is 
only their color and not their substance.'* 



84 



THE HAUNTS OF 
WALT WHITMAN 



Camden — The Ferry — Whitman's Comrades - Where his Mo- 
ther Ditd—Ste-vens Street - Eminent Visitors- Mickle 
Street House — Poeis Chamber and Associations — Poems — 
Relics — Timber Creek — Whitman s Resorts in Field and 
Wood— His Funeral — His Tomb. 

T TOWEVER widely opinions concerning Walt 
■^ ■*■ Whitman may differ, he cannot be ignored ; 
whether we esteem him a poet and seer, or a 
shameless charlatan, we cannot deny to him a 
prominent place in American Hterature. The re- 
vilings of the multitude for whom his utterances 
contained no tidings, and the superlative encomiums 
of the lesser number, who, like Tennyson, thought 
him one of the greatest of contemporary poets, or, 
like Emerson, found his work "the most extraor- 
dinary piece of wit and wisdom that America had 
yet contributed," serve to invest the daring writer 
with a peculiar interest, and to render the spots 
once associated with his presence and poems places 
of curious attention or of veritable pilgrimage. 
Some of the scenes of his youth and young man- 
hood have been sketched in a previous booklet of 
these papers. 1 

ISee "A Long Island Ramble" in "Literary Haunts and 
Homes of American Authors." 

85 



Literary Rambles 

The circumstances of his later life, the bravely- 
borne sufferings of his last years, and the splendid 
optimism which illuminates his poetic productions 
of that period have imparted to his haunts and habi- 
tations of that later time an element of especial 
regard in the estimation of those who have loved 
the poet and perceived his message. Most of these 
shrines lie near his own *' placid Delaware'* and 
in the neighborhood of Philadelphia. One of the 
many confessed ** Whitmaniacs" is our conductor 
and companion in repeated pilgrimages to the places 
where he had known the good gray poet. The 
broad Delaware is itself a reminder of Whitman; 
its flowing tides, its varying phases of surface, its 
reflections of fleckless light, of drifting clouds, of 
golden haze, of starht heaven were all noted by 
him as he ** cross' d and cross' d" upon the ferry. 
Here for hours together he haunted the boats, chat- 
ting with the boatmen or mutely observing the pas- 
sengers, the moving river-craft, the flying birds, the 
"fluid shadows," the changing sky; or, more often, 
in the silent hours of" flill-starr' d, blue-black night,'* 
pacing the deck alone, communing with the water, 
the air, the heaven — objects that ** speak no word, 
nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so com- 
municative to the soul." How far these objects 
affected his muse, or how much of his devout and 
optimistic master-verse was here begotten of the 

86 



Camden Ferry and Ferrymen 

contemplations such objects inspired, we may never 
know. 

Some of these river sights and scenes he depicted 
in the graphic prose of his ** Specimen Days," 
which Dr. Bucke has called **the brightest and 
halest ' Diary of an Invalid ' ever written ' ' ; the same 
pages bear loving testimony to the friendliness of the 
ferrymen, and the tonic and healthfhl influence upon 
the poet of their ** hardy ways." It chances that 
we cross the river upon the Wenonah, the craft 
which, as **the new ferry-boat," Whitman cele- 
brated as a '"^ perfect creation of beauty and motion 
and power"; and we find in Camden more than 
one of the poet's ''ferry-friends," whom he men- 
tioned by name in ** Specimen Days," who, with 
evident enjoyment, recount incidents of his many 
excursions with them upon the river and exhibit 
the few simple articles that were his gifts. 

In Camden streets and shops we meet many who 
for years had daily greeted the venerable poet as, 
with leonine head crowned with silvery hair, with 
ruddy, bearded and benignant face, v/ith stout, 
broad-shouldered figure clad in well-worn garb of 
gray, with snowy linen open at the throat, with a 
friendly nod of recognition and a deep-voiced salu- 
tation for every one, he slowly limped along the 
sidewalk, or drove his horse and buggy — the gift 
of a circle of admirers — or, later, was wheeled in 

87 



Literary Rambles 

his chair by his trusty attendant, Warren Fritzinger. 
**Warry" is dead and Whitman's chair now is 
the valued possession of his next-door neighbor, 
upon an invalid member of v^hose family the poet 
bestowed it when his own increasing illness forbade 
his using it more. 

An unpretentious dwelling in Stevens Street — a 
neat and quiet thoroughfare leading back from the 
river — was for a time the home of Colonel George 
Whitman, the brother whose wounds — received at 
Fredericksburg — first drew the poet to the seat of 
war and led to the beneficent and self-sacrificing 
hospital labors to which we owe such poems as 
"The Wound-Dresser" and **A March in the 
Ranks Hard-press' d," and the thrilling and im- 
pressive records of his «« Memoranda of the War." 
In this house Whitman witnessed the death of his 
adored mother, that * 'sweetest and best woman'* 
to whose memory he wrote long years afterward in 
**As at thy Portals also. Death": 

**To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me, 

(I see again the calm face, fresh and beautiful still;) 

To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, 

life, love, to me the best, 
I grave a monumental line, before I go." 

A newer house a block or so above upon the same 
thoroughfare became a little later the residence of 
Colonel Whitman, and, the poet's physical prostration 

88 



Whitman in Stevens Street 

having been completed by the shock of his mother's 
death, he relinquished his post at Washington and 
was brought here — to die, as he supposed. In the 
long dark years that followed, his hope, health and 
finances were at their lowest ebb, but after a period 
of pain and isolation, patiently endured «'amid the 
nearness and the silent thought of death," he slowly 
attained to that condition of half-health of which he 
so often spoke, and — **old, poor and paralyzed" — 
lived on. 

We find this dwelling numbered four hundred and 
thirty-one, a neat and modest fabric of red brick, 
with white stone steps and lintels, and with a French 
window at the side, still owned by Whitman's 
younger brother but no longer occupied by him, 
and nowise changed since the poet was here an in- 
mate. Two stalwart maples grow by the curbstone 
in fi-ont, and old residents of the neighborhood re- 
member Whitman, with his antique Greek face and 
snowy beard, as he sat upon the doorstep in the 
shade of these trees, chatting with his friends and 
cordially greeting each passer. 

The pleasant back room of the third floor was 
occupied by the poet during most of the ten years 
of his stay beneath this roof, and here some of the 
literary labor of those years was accomplished, his 
completed manuscript being carefiilly composed from 
memoranda penciled in home-made note-books 

89 



Literary Rambles 

wherever the ideas came to him, upon the ferry-boats, 
by the seashore, on the street, in the woods and 
fields. To this period belong, among other works, 
the pregnant and luminous prose of ** Specimen 
Days," the devout stanzas of **The Prayer of 
Columbus," with other poems of "From Noon to 
Starry Night," and the complete revision of *' Leaves 
of Grass," the book in whose candid and passionate 
utterances some have found a new gospel that 
would *^take the shame from birth," as well as **the 
crape from death," and regenerate mankind. In the 
little sitting-room at the left of the entrance hall oc- 
curred the first interview between Whitman and his 
biographer. Dr. Bucke. To the poet here came such 
visitors as Longfellow, Burroughs, Colonel Forney, 
Lord Houghton, and appreciative messages of greet- 
ing and cheer from Emerson, Ruskin, Rossetti, 
Tennyson, Swinburne, Conway, Buchanan, Edwin 
Arnold, Justin H. McCarthy, Joaquin Miller, John 
Addington Symonds and other approving friends. 

In 1883 Colonel Whitman removed from Camden 
and the poet came into possession of the residence 
which is most commonly associated with his name 
and fame. It stands in the next (Mickle) street, but 
a httle way from the humble tenement in which 
Mrs, Howarth ('* Clementine " ) wrote the tender 
lyric **'Tis But a Little Faded Flower," and not 
much farther from the old two-storied, dormer- win- 

90 



Whitman's "Shanty" — Mickle Street 

dowed brick cottage where Audubon dwelt for a 
time while making some of the excursions and re- 
searches upon which his journals and sketches were 
founded. Mickle is a street of small and unpreten- 
tious dwellings, with brick sidewalks and rude cob- 
blestone pavement, resonant this summer morning 
with the cries of venders and the clatter of jolting 
carts. Whitman's ** shanty" (as he called it), the 
little two-storied, box-Hke fabric of six rooms now 
numbered three hundred and thirty, is one of the 
humbler dwellings of the neighborhood, and, ex- 
teriorly, is scarcely changed since we visited him 
here: l a few long-needed repairs have been made 
and the front has been painted, but the weather-worn 
boards, the old shutters and doors, and the prevail- 
ing aspect of dejection so famihar to the poet's 
friends remain. 

The house is still owned by his estate and his 
name is upon the marble stepping-stone at the curb, 
but the gentle-faced Mary Davis — Whitman's 
*' good, faithfiil Jersey woman" — who used to open 
the door to visitors is succeeded by one who expects 
a fee for showing the place, and the once sacred 
rooms, so long the dwelling-place of the venerable 
bard, have since been profaned by lodgers. In the 
one apartment which was peculiarly Whitman' s own, 
the large front chamber which was his sleeping -room, 
1 See "Literary Shrines." 
91 



Literary Rambles 

his workshop and the store-house for the hterary 
collections of his lifetime, the changes are most 
obvious. The mass of books, papers, magazines and 
manuscripts which used to fill the tables, chairs, 
trunks and cases and to overflow upon the floor, 
have been removed by his literary executors; the 
portraits and some other articles are in possession of 
his brother at Burlington, New Jersey; Mrs. Davis 
has removed other effects which belonged to her, and 
one table which no one, apparently, thought worth 
taking away has been exposed in the yard. 

This poor place was for nine years the abode of 
him who has been called one of the world's immor- 
tals. Here, 

"A batter'd, wreck'd old man," 

dependent mainly upon the support of transatlantic 
admirers, he lived in poverty, much of the time in 
corporal suffering, — ** cheerfully borne when cheer 
was possible and patiently when cheer became im- 
possible," — unaffected by derision, unembittered by 
abuse, never losing faith in his daring ideals nor in 
the great American humanity which he chanted. 

The low-studded chamber seems poor and com- 
monplace, yet it has held some of earth's shining 
ones, who bore to its occupant their contributions of 
honor and praise, and to it have come, as pilgrims 
to a fane, visitors from every part of our own coun- 

92 



Whitman's Workshop and Works 

try and from lands beyond the sea. Here, during the 
lulls of physical pain, was done much of the indoor 
work of Whitman' s last years, the years in which he 
gave to the world the poems of ** Sands at Seventy," 
"Good-Bye, My Fancy," *'01d Age Echoes," 
with their effulgence of faith, and his swan-song 
with its affectionate greeting to Death, that 

*' holiest minister of Heaven — envoy, usherer, guide 
at last of all, 
Rich, florid loosener of the stricture-knot called life, 
Sweet, peaceful, w^elcome Death." 

Such poems, written within the mystic borderland 
of the unknown, fitly concluded his epic, * * Leaves 
of Grass ' ' ; with its completion he deemed his life- 
work done and fearlessly turned his face toward the 
shoreless sea. In this room he sank in mortal illness, 
slowly dying through long months, and here finally 
was effectuated his **Last Invocation." 

*' At the last, tenderly . . . 

Let me be wafted, 

Let me glide noiselessly forth ; 

With the key of softness unlock the locks — with a whisper 

Set ope the doors, O soul." 

Those who knew this chamber ere it was de- 
prived of the presence which illumined it will love 
to recall its arrangement and associations. Just here 
stood his large table with its array of books and 
papers; here is the place of his heavy-timbered arm- 

93 



Literary Rambles 

chair, with its ratan seat and great wolf-skin robe; on 
this side stood the old-fashioned wood-stove; hy yon- 
der front window was his favorite nook where he sat 
to look out upon the street, to play with his pets or to 
write upon his knee with the pencil or huge Falcon 
pen kept upon the window-ledge; by yonder wall 
was the white- counterpaned bed on which he lan- 
guished and died. In the cheerless little back parlor 
the dead poet lay in his massive oaken casket, while 
thronging thousands filed slowly past to look for the 
last time upon his countenance. 

A near-by street now holds the simple home of 
Mrs. Davis, the ** Jersey woman" who so long 
*' took vigilant care of" the poet, as he gratefully 
testified, where the visitor may see many reminders 
of him, the plaster cast of his head, made two years 
before his death, and most of the effects which fiir- 
nished his Mickle Street dwelling — including his 
bedstead and the chair in which he last sat. But a 
little farther away lives Horace L. Traubel, for years 
Whitman' s intimate friend and assistant and now one 
of his literary executors, who affectionately preserves 
numerous priceless mementos of this poet of democ- 
racy, — among them being the old and worn haver- 
sack which, in his ** Drum-Taps" days. Whitman 
carried on his devoted rounds among the hospitals 
and which has held thousands of needed gifts and 
comforts for sick and dying heroes; in Traubel' s 

94 



Relics — Reminiscences 

hands, too, we see the poet's own soiled and 
tattered copy of the original edition of**Leaves of 
Grass," with its many marginal notes and oft-cor- 
rected memoranda in his careful chirography. 

A lonely farm on Timber Creek, some miles 
distant from Whitman's home, was during many 
years his sanitarium and best beloved retreat. To 
its restful seclusion he resorted in all seasons and 
often for long periods, to spend *' dear, soothing, 
healthy restoration-hours ' ' in solitary saunterings 
among the fields and woods. Here, where he was 
close to nature and thoroughly en rapport with her 
moods, some of his idyllic canticles were conceived, 
and pages of ** Specimen Days " and *' November 
Boughs ' ' were written amid the rural charms which 
animated them and the scenes those pages picture. 

The place is a solitude no longer ; its whole at- 
mosphere and environment are changed. The 
household with whom Whitman dwelt are dead or 
scattered, the farm-house is overshadowed by new 
and pretentious dwellings, — one of which en- 
croaches upon its yard, — the adjacent fields are 
traversed by streets and divided into building- 
plots, and a town is planned and partly built about 
Whitman's whilom haunts. His <* hobby-liking," 
the long farm lane, fenced with old rails * * green 
with dabs of moss," where he used to walk with 
labored pace and breathe the honey-scent of the 

95 



Literary Rambles 

buckwheat or the subtler perfume of the growing 
maize, is now expanded into an ambitious village 
" avenue '* ; the adjoining field of his sketch, '^Gath- 
ering the Corn," is the site of several houses ; 
other dweUings occupy the once grassy upland in- 
closure at the end of the lane to which he resorted 
in the ** miracle-hours " after sunsetting, when the 
heavens declared the glory of God and the view 
** calmed and exalted his soul beyond description." 
But many more of his haunts remain here undis- 
turbed or undestroyed. Of these Whitman's 
descriptions are so vivid that we scarce require the 
guidance of his friend in our quest for them : the 
course of a lingering stroll, made on a spotiess, 
odor-laden summer morning which would have 
delighted the heart of the aged minstrel, discovers 
them all. The spring ceaselessly gurgling under 
the willows — ** musical as soft-clinking glasses " — 
where he sat in sultry afternoons ; the wild dell of 
his Adamic sun-baths, whose recesses **he and 
certain thrushes and catbirds had all to themselves ' * 
in many a summer hour ; his lounges by the pond 
where he sometimes ** idled dehciously " far into 
the night ; his favorite trees — the great oak, 
''sturdy, vital, green," beneath which he often sat 
to write, and that < * Apollo of the woods ' ' the 
near-by tulip tree, ** tall and graceful, yet robust 
and sinewy, as if the beauteous leafy creature could 

96 



Timber Creek Haunts 

walk if it only would'* — the trees that once, in the 
fancy of the poet, promenaded the turf, leaning 
down to whisper to him as they passed, ** We do 
all this exceptionally, just for you." 

We follow the wooded windings of the brook 
upon whose banks he loved to linger, soothed and 
inspirited by the murmur of waters and the bravuras 
of birds — the only sounds that broke the *« warm, 
indolent, half- voluptuous silence." We explore 
the recesses of his grove, which * * the Albic Druids 
might have chosen," and find there and in the 
cool depths of the farther wood the retreats to 
which he came bearing his portable chair to sit — 
"absorbing, enjoying all" — as he '* read and fil- 
tered ' ' his favorite authors, or wrote with the leaf- 
shadowp quivering upon his page. We tarry long 
in silent thought in the wild, firee place of his daily 
haunt, where the poet and seer so often mused on 
his ^' sane or sick spirit, here as near at peace as it 
could be," and where we would fain have made 
his grave when that spirit had, beyond death's por- 
tal, attained to perfect peace — 

**The untold want, by life ne'er granted.'' 

Harieigh Cemetery, a mile or so outside of 
Camden, is the place Whitman selected for his 
burial. On a steep hillside clothed by natural 

G 97 



Literary Rambles 

forest trees — oaks, beeches, and hickories — he 
prepared his sepulcher, designing it himself, and 
coming frequently, until cumulative imfirmities pre- 
vented, to supervise the work of construction, 
which was completed but a little time before his 
death. 

To this spot, chosen by the bard because, as he 
said, he wished * * to go into the woods, ' ' his mor- 
tal part was brought one bright day of March, 
seventy- three years after that other spring day 
when, in his own loved ** lilac- time,'* he came 
into the world. The coffined body was borne by 
friends and literary associates and followed by 
thousands of that vast multitude of the "common 
people ' ■ his song exalted and glorified, who stood 
under the whispering trees about his tomb and 
listened to tender and eloquent words of eulogy, to 
excerpts from his own grand utterances, and saw 
him given back to *^ nature's clasp and kiss." 

From the cemetery entrance a drive dappled 
with leafy shadows winds through the woods to the 
left, and conducts us to Whitman's resting-place. 
It is a capacious vault of ponderous, rough-tooled 
blocks of granite, surmounted by a triangular mass, 
weighing several tons, which is graven with his 
name. The massive stone door stands ajar and 
through it we see the sealed crypts which contain 
the ashes of the poet and of some of his "kindred — 

98 



> 






■*'•"■''■■ 



;*i&-. 



forest >>, bee 



ork of construv 
eted but a little time before hl^ 

uo ) // the bard because, as he 

to go into the woods,'* his mor- 

one bright day of March, 

'• spring day 

" hi- 



.^nve dappled 

tiie Vv'oods to the 

.>.^. ....... ..in' s resting-place. 

It '; t r L of ponderous, rough-tooled 

b surmounted by a triangular mass, 

weighing several tons, which is graven with his 

'^' massive stone door stands ajar and 

c^r t^.p sealed crypts which contain 

md of some of his "kindred — 



mms^. 
















The Poet's Grave 

his parents, a brother, a brother's wife and her child, 
and the little Walt Whitman that died in infancy. 

Beyond the trees we have glimpses of more 
artificial portions of the cemetery, with smooth- 
shaven sward and ornate memorials, but in this 
spot where the poet lies is preserved something of 
the primitive naturalness in which he delighted. 
Creeping vines and leafy boughs closely invest the 
vault, tall trees tower above it, and one graceful 
hickory, which was saved from destruction by the 
interposition of the poet, now drops its heavy fruit 
at the fern-bordered threshold of his tomb. 

As we linger amid the sweet wood-smells we 
see, through the swaying foliage, the glint of blue 
sky overhead, the shimmer of near-by waters, 
shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty on every hand, we 
hear the murmur of soft winds in the tree-tops, the 
chatter of squirrels, the liquid music of birds, the 
shrill song of cicadas — all sights and sounds of 
sweet summer time. We tarry until other visitors 
come bringing chaplets of wild-flowers to deck the 
vault, then we pluck as a memento a single frond 
from the ferns that grow beside the portal and 
slowly go out from the place, pausing to look back 
fi-om a turn in the path and repeat the lines of 
Stedman's farewell to the hoar and reverend 
chanter : 

" Good-bye, old Walt, good-bye ! " 

99 



ttfC 



A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE BY 
THE DELAWARE 



Cooper'' s Ancestors — Birthplace — Burlington — Dr. English — 
Frank R. Stockton — Bordentoivn — Hopkinson — Paine — 
Gilder — Trenton — Where Dr. Abbott Lives and Writes 
—His Habits of Composition — Places of Discoveries and 
Sketches — Scenes of Fiction — *' Clementine " Hoivarth. 

'nr^HE region of the lower Delaware, where our 
-■- Whitman pilgrimages terminate at his sepul- 
cher, holds other shrines which appeal to the 
bookish wayfarer. Journeying northward from 
the Quaker City, we find beyond disfiguring fac- 
tories the broad river flowing between low-lying 
banks of green, or, farther, at the base of picturesque 
bluffs. 

Both plain and upland are diversified by sun- 
kissed fields and heavy-tinted copses, and dotted by 
villas, villages, and farmsteads, among which are a 
few favored spots whose beauties have for us the 
additional charm which literary associations impart. 

Several miles of the New Jersey bank were the 
original possession of the immigrant ancestors of 
James Fenimore Cooper, and at Beverly is the 
place of the homestead in which was born and 
reared the Elizabeth Fenimore who became the 
wife of WilHam Cooper and the mother of the 
great pioneer of American fiction. To this home 

loo 



Birthplace of Cooper 

she returned, in the infancy of the future novelist, 
to remain during some portion of the time while 
her husband, who had failed in a commercial ven- 
ture near by, was preparing a dwelling for his 
family in the then unbroken wilderness of Otsego — 
the region which the genius of his son afterward 
peopled with the creations of fancy and clothed 
with the witchery of fiction. 

We see in the shaded streets of the historic old 
river-town of Burlington, three miles distant, the 
birthplace of one who has rendered the name of 
Cooper illustrious. In a staid and comfortable 
dwelling, which was among the best the town 
afforded and then stood in the outskirts, — **the 
last house but one as you go into the country, ' ' — 
James Fenimore Cooper first opened his eyes to the 
light September 15, 1789. We find the domicile 
still remaining, a sober, quaint, two-storied fabric 
of stuccoed brick, now numbered 457, on Main 
Street. It is of moderate size and stands close 
upon the sidewalk, its fi*ont shaded by tall trees 
which grow at the curbstone and overhang the 
sloping roofs. The similar dwelling next door was 
then the residence of the father of the naval hero. 
Captain James Lawrence, with whom Cooper 
sailed as a subaltern officer of the Wasp in 1809, 
upon one of the voyages which gave to the latter 

lOI 



Literary Rambles 

that intimate knowledge of seamanship afterward 
displayed in *'The Pilot," "Red Rover," and 
other thrilling tales of the ocean. 

Not far away lived an eccentric individual named 
Sorsby, who has been believed to be the original 
of one of the principal personages in Cooper's novel 
of *'The Pioneers"; it is remembered of him that 
the trait most prominent in the character of which 
he was the alleged prototype eventually wrought his 
ruin, and he died a pauper in the county almshouse. 
In an ancient edifice nearer the river on the same 
street the father of the novelist was, before his son's 
birth, engaged in mercantile pursuits, and it is to 
the failure of this merchandising that we are in- 
debted for Cooper's introduction to the scene of so 
much of his best fiction. 

Upon a corner of near-by York Street stands the 
plain old brick school-house where, seven decades 
ago, Thomas Dunn English — since famous as the 
author of **Ben Bolt" and of hundreds of better 
but less popular poems — was for some years a 
pupil; here he made a survey map of this ancient 
town, which was the pride and dehght of his master. 

The Stocktons were among the early settlers of 
Burlington. A pretty, vine-embowered dwelling, 
locally known as '*Ivy Cottage," and standing a 
little back from the corner of Main and Pearl 
Streets, a short block from the riverside, was once 

I02 



English — Stockton — Bordentown 

the abode of the now renowned writer of '* Rudder 
Grange" and many other inimitable books. To 
this homelet, which aforetime had been the resi- 
dence of the gallant Lawrence, of the Chesapeake, 
Stockton came with his bride nearly forty years ago, 
and here he produced some of his first literary work, 
including **The Story of Champaigne," which 
was published in The Southern Literary Messenger 
during the Civil War. The cottage has been reno- 
vated and now stands shorn of its picturesque fea- 
tures, a plain and bare box of rough-cast brick. A 
modest home at the end of Greenbank also was for 
a time occupied by the future propounder of that 
classic conundrum, **The Lady or the Tiger?" 
Horn is a rather common cognomen in this vicin- 
age, and it has been surmised that this appellation 
was remembered by the author when, long years 
afterward, he named the heroic captain in the ex- 
citing tale of *' Adventures. ' ' At Juliustown, in the 
same county, Joshua R. Lippincott, the founder of 
the great Philadelphia pubHshing house, was born. 

Ten miles beyond Burlington the bluff river- 
bank is crowned by the storied village of Borden- 
town, in the shade and quiet of whose quaint old 
streets the sentimental tourist will be tempted to 
tarry. Here are prim dwellings whose air of dig- 
nified sobriety belongs to a century older than ours, 
houses which have harbored historic personages, 

103 



Literary Rambles 

homes and haunts of literators. One stately Colo- 
nial mansion, standing at a corner of the olden 
Main Street, erstwhile was the domicile of Francis 
Hopkinson, who here wrote his ** harmonious 
ditty" of the ** Battle of the Kegs" and other less 
popular verse. Later the house became the heri- 
tage of his son, Joseph Hopkinson, author of the 
stirring stanzas of ** Hail, Columbia," who dwelt 
here with his wife, the beautiful belle to whom 
** Anacreon " Moore addressed his sentimental 
*' Lines written on Leaving Philadelphia." Save 
for the substitution of a mansard for the ancient 
sloping roof the mansion remains substantially un- 
changed, and is now the property of the son and 
the home of the granddaughter of Judge Hopkinson. 
In a commodious dwelling near the verge of the 
steep bluff Thomas Paine, the once famoue writer 
of "Common Sense," was often the esteemed 
guest of his friend. Colonel Kirkbride, and the 
corner room above the parlor at the left of the en- 
trance was occupied by him for months at a time. 
In those days Paine was ** the honored man" of 
the place, in friendly correspondence with Washing- 
ton and other Revolutionary leaders ; mounted 
upon his horse, "Button," he was almost daily 
seen riding in the village streets or through the 
shady lanes of the near countryside. This Kirk- 
bride house forms now a part of a *' Female Col- 

104 



Hopkinson — Paine — The Gilders 

lege," and the site of the smaller house, in its 
* * two tenths of an acre ' ' of garden, which Paine 
later owned and occupied for several years, and 
where he did some of his less important literary 
work, has been overbuilt by a store and dwelling. 
The latter is now inhabited by the daughter of an 
admirer of Paine, who purchased the place from 
that author ea^'ly in the nineteenth century. 

Park Street sometime led to the park and palace 
of Joseph Bonapaa-te, once King of Spain, and upon 
this thoroughfare we still see the long, low, strag- 
gling structure which was the dwelling of Prince 
Lucien Murat (nephew of Napoleon), where his 
accomplished wife conducted a school for girls. 

The Gilders have long been associated with this 
old town, which holds the birthplace of at least 
one eminent member of that family. Above a 
century has elapsed since an ancestor of the present 
trio of editors and writers erected, a half-mile out 
upon the Crosswicks road, the home in which the 
poet Richard Watson Gilder was born fifty-five 
years ago. This is **The Homestead" he cele- 
brated in the poem written here. The house is a 
large, old-fashioned mansion, with dormer windows 
in its sloping roofs and with a wing projecting 
from one of its sides ; its rooms have wide fire- 
places and are furnished forth with quaint and 
handsome heirlooms, the prized possessions of pre- 

105 



Literary Rambles 

vious generations. Environing the dwelling are 
generous gardens and grounds where we see the 
** white lilacs and the buttonwoods," the ** stark 
poplars," the *''pine groves," the "threading 
brook ' ' of Gilder' s lyric ; yonder httle mead, 
through which the " slow stream curves and 
dallies," is that dreamful resort of his boyhood, the 
least o-f the **Two Valleys" of his ''Great Re- 
membrance ' ' volume. The patriarchal trees which 
grow by the house should be honored as the theme 
of the poet's earliest stanzas. *' Bellevue," as the 
place is called, is still owned by the family ; the 
poet now comes to it only as an occasional visitor, 
but the popular "Lounger" and the co-editors of 
The Critic f Jeannette and Joseph Gilder, occupy 
it some part of each year. 

From Bordentown the grounds which constituted 
ex-King Bonaparte's park extend several furlongs 
northward along the wood-crowned bluff; farther 
lie broad acres once tilled by the English- Quaker 
progenitors of Dr. Charles Conrad Abbott ; beyond 
those and nearer to Trenton we find the ancestral 
home of that skilled naturalist, astute archaeologist, 
and versatile author. To visit him here among his 
own "uplands and meadows," where most of his 
life has been passed and most of his work has been 
done, is the predominant purpose of this pilgrimage 
along the Delaware. 

1 06 



Home of Doctor Abbott 

From the Trenton road a lane leads, between 
sunny fields and beneath overhanging maples and 
apple trees, to the mansion we seek. It is set 
upon a grassy eminence, a semicircle of sighing 
pines stand guard at the back, and upon every side 
tower foliaged giants — locusts, lindens, sycamores, 
elms, beeches — whose branches shelter and shade 
the venerable walls. From this site we see upon 
the one hand vistas of undulating sweeps of tillage, 
upon the other hand we look across wide-reaching 
meads, bosky lowlands, and the distant river to a 
farther expanse of fields fringed and dotted with 
trees. The dwelling is a substantial, old-fashioned, 
and wholly delightflil edifice of wood, whose mas- 
sive timbers were erected by the great-grandfather 
of the present occupant. The suns and storms of 
near a century have weathered its walls, and the 
touch of time has toned and mellowed it into an 
aspect of dignified comeliness to which our modern 
staring structures never attain. 

Within, a wide hall extends through the center 
of the house, having porch-shaded doors at either 
end ; flanking the hall are spacious, low-studded, 
pleasantly fiirnished rooms, wherein are tastefiilly 
arranged books and curios, cherished family relics 
and antiquities, and many interesting specimens 
gathered by Dr. Abbott in his outdoor rambles. 
The "andirons" of his ** December" essay stand 
upon the hospitable hearth of the parlor at the 

107 



Literary Rambles 

right, and directly above is the pleasant chamber 
which is the author's literary workshop, not his 
study, for that is — as Emerson's was — ** any- 
where out-of-doors." 

A recess beside the large fireplace contains the 
Doctor' s desk, — a quaint combination of bookcase, 
bureau, and writing-desk, with many pigeonholes, 
curious little drawers, and amazing secret recep- 
tacles, — which was made in 1759 ^^^ ^^^ descended 
to its present owner through four generations of 
Abbotts. In exploring its covert repositories since 
it came into his possession the Doctor has discov- 
ered some interesting documents relating to his 
family history, and it now contains title-deeds and 
other instruments and records datin? well back into 
the seventeenth century. Upon this desk — men- 
tioned in Abbott's <* Rambles of a Naturalist " — 
he has written all his widely read books, including 
the recently published *'In Nature's Realm," and 
nearly all of the more than one hundred and fifty 
reports, essays, monographs, etc., in which he has 
imparted to the public the results of his thoughtful 
researches. 

Here nightly he minutely registers in large, 
ledger-like volumes, which have been accumulating 
for nearly forty years, the field-studies and observa- 
tions of the day ; and here for two or three hours 
of each morning he is systematically engaged in 

108 



Where and How Abbott Writes 

elaborating from these records his fascinating sketches 
and the chapters of his popular books on outdoor 
themes, or else is engaged upon more imaginative 
and purely literary compositions. The latter, also, 
are produced largely by developing, arranging, and 
combining previous jottings and memoranda. These 
are made upon tablets (which the Doctor always 
carries for the purpose), and in any of the accus- 
tomed haunts of his observant idleness, — by the 
creek, in the woods, the field, the lowland swamp, 
even in a sightly tree-top, — and these jottings record 
not so much events as ideas, outlines of plots, sug- 
gestions for fictional characters and incidents, even 
poetical lines which come to mind during his daily 
*' rambles about home" and are measurably incited 
by the scenes among which those rambles lead. 

Not all the work accomplished upon the old 
desk is done in the methodical morning hours ; the 
Doctor is often moved to literary production at 
other times, and once, not long ago, he seated him- 
self here at bedtime to add a line for the completion 
of a paragraph of his morning's work, and wrote 
steadily on until surprised by four o'clock and 
dawn. While he is writing a book upon the top 
of the desk he usually has in cache somewhere 
within or beneath it the manuscript of another vol- 
ume, which is ** seasoning" while it awaits the 
author's pleasure to give it to the world. 

109 



Literary Rambles 

Lately he has been especially engaged in archaeo- 
logical researches, extensive excavations having been 
made upon his farm which brought to light many 
traces of ancient man which will help to settle the 
question of the antiquity of human occupation of 
the Delaware valley. This question has so long 
and seriously occupied his attention that he is 
naturally gratified that the outcome of the recent 
most carefully conducted explorations has been to 
confirm the view previously set forth by him. 

Dr. Abbott's enthusiasm, when he encounters 
some novelty in natural history, strikes his neighbors 
with astonishment at times, — as when he chases a 
butterfly or beetle into a back yard and kicks the 
dog that interferes, — and has given rise to some 
strange impressions concerning him : one neighbor, 
being asked by a literary pilgrim if she knew where 
Dr. Abbott lived, replied, **Him as collects bugs 
for the gov'ment? Oh, back in the woods some- 
wheres ! ' ' 

The Doctor's quaint farm-house figures in his 
writings ; a double door which formerly opened at 
one side is celebrated as the **old kitchen door" 
of ** Travels in a Tree-Top." Around the house 
lie the broad acres which have produced for us 
abundant crops of something better than esculents ; 
here are fields where, as boy and man. Dr. Abbott 
has explored all his life, and made the discoveries to 

I lO 



Abbott- — Researches and Collections 

which we are indebted for his scientific works, and 
scenes which not only inspired but provided the 
themes and settings for many of his charming 
chapters. 

Pleasantly remembered strolls with the genial 
author among his haunts enable us to identify ob- 
jects and places long known to us through his books. 
The plateau of ploughland extending backward 
from the bluiF flirnished most of the materials upon 
which he founded his ** Stone Age in New Jersey " 
and <* Primitive Industry." Neolithic weapons 
and implements have here been found in great 
abundance, and the Doctor believes that not less 
than one hundred thousand specimens have been 
collected within a mile or two of his residence. 
Many thousands have been gathered from his own 
fields ; he has deposited in the Peabody Museum at 
Cambridge twenty-five thousand specimens, which 
constitute the most important series of that charac- 
ter ever brought together, and other thousands have 
been placed in other archeeological institutions. 
Among these relic-strewn fields is the "sink-hole" 
with which the Doctor has made us familiar, and 
this tract, with the adjacent stretches of forest, con- 
stitutes the ** upland" of his '* Upland and 
Meadow," the volume which a noted English 
critic pronounces the most delightfiil of its kind that 
America has produced. 

Ill 



Literary Rambles 

ThebluiFso frequently mentioned in Dr. Abbott's 
archaeological works rises from low bottom-lands to 
the margin of his lawn and curves away for miles. 
Its steep incline is thickly clad with bird-haunted 
foliage, in whose shady retreats he made many ob- 
servations noted in ''The Birds About Us" and 
other books. Upon the brow of the bluff near 
the house '*the three beeches" which give a name 
to the place spread their giant branches, — trees so 
venerable that they were described for landmarks as 
long ago as 1689, — and farther down the slope 
stands the majestic chestnut-leaved oak pictured in 
one of the illustrations of ** Clear Skies and 
Cloudy." 

This precipitous acclivity bounds the ancient 
river-bed and is the ** gravelly, bluffy bank" where 
were found most of the paleolithic implements, the 
study of which has led to some of the Doctor's im- 
portant archaeological discoveries and publications. 
Many of the rude chipped stones were found in the 
talus, but a considerable number were discoved in 
situ in freshly exposed portions of the face of the 
escarpment and at a depth of many feet from the 
surface. The character of these implements, their 
characteristic occurrence here in the glacial drift, 
the finding of human fragments with those of the 
mastodon, musk-ox, walrus, etc., in the same de- 
posit, apparently justify the conclusion reached in 

1 12 



Rambles and Resorts 

Dr. Abbott's writings, that the implements be- 
longed to a primitive race — probably akin to the 
now boreal Eskimo — who dwelt in this river- 
valley at least as long ago as the great ice age — 
** untold centuries before the advent of the Indian." 

At the foot of the bluff we find the place of 
Abbott's ** Winter Night's Outing," and the reach 
of low-lying grass-lands and tangled swamps which 
extends from the bluff to the present river-bank 
half a mile away has a prominent place in his 
books. Here are his "mucky meadow" and other 
scenes among which his trained and alert senses 
noted many of those observations of animal and 
plant life which animate ** A Naturalist's Rambles," 
** Upland and Meadow," and similar volumes. 
In a corner of the meadow in this lowland tract 
the Doctor shows us one of his favorite retreats — 
a shadow-flecked nook where the great stump of a 
fallen ash tree furnishes a seat upon which, with a 
slumberous landscape of summer beauty outspread 
before him, he sometimes sits for hours together 
meditating or composing his chapters. The white- 
oak grove near the mouth of a gully is the rural 
Colosseum in which assembled the *' Corvine Con- 
gress" of his ''Clear Skies and Cloudy." 

The *' gully road" leads us back to the upland 
through a ravine whose steep banks have yielded 
some of the wonderflil paleolithic implements, dis- 

H 113 



Literary Rambles 

closed by flood erosions of the now diminutive 
brooklet which murmurs musically through the dell 
on its way to the river. This ravine is shaded by 
fine old trees, and one magnificent oak which casts 
its branches above the brook has for us more than a 
passing interest, for it was while looking out upon 
the pleasant prospect of forest, field, and mead from 
its topmost boughs — to which he had climbed in 
quest of a bird's nest — that the Doctor conceived 
the idea of his fascinating ** Travels in a Tree-Top." 
Beyond the garden is "the stile," across it lies 
the way to the ** sprout land" on a neighbor's 
domain, and farther afield are other familiar locah- 
ties: Cook's woods, a half-mile distant, is the 
scene of the sketch, *'Out of the Beaten Path"; 
the <*01d Barn" of *« Notes of the Night" stood 
upon the adjacent farm; the stream of his **Up 
the Creek" is the foliage-fringed Crosswicks, which 
sluggishly flows a little way below, his companions 
in the outing described in that chapter being Joseph 
and Jeannette Gilder of Bellevue; by one sharp 
flexure of the stream is the great hollow tree which 
was his refuge in **The Poetry of Shelter," and 
the adjacent lands were the haunt of Miles Over- 
field, Abbott's **Cuvier of Crosswicks Creek." 
The ** Pearson's Lane" of his essay is but a mile 
away fi"om his own and leads to the farmstead 
where the hero and heroine of his * * A Colonial 

114 



Scenes of Abbott's Books — Howarth 

Wooing, ' ' who were the ancestors of the author, 
settled after their marriage. The same farm is the 
scene of his later novel, ** When the Century Was 
New," which so faithfully depicts the conditions 
of that time; and the storied farm-house, *'Hutton 
Hall" of the tale, still stands — half wood and 
half brick, as pictured upon the cover of the volume 
— in venerable age. 

It is among such halcyon scenes, pervaded by 
the most endearing associations, that our author 
contentedly dwells in mid-life, pursuing with sym- 
pathetic love for nature's every phase those studies 
which have brought to him honor and fame, writ- 
ing new chapters for new books, and meditating 
others which are to edify and delight us in time 
to come. 

Here we had planned to end our present pil- 
grimage, but the staid old city of Trenton has one 
spot to which our footsteps always turn when we 
chance to be in its vicinage. It is a modest clap- 
boarded cottage standing in a quiet and unpreten- 
tious little street near the State Model School; a 
diminutive square of greensward lies before it, a vine- 
clad porch shades its entrance, and within lately 
dwelt in age and obscurity Mrs. Howarth, the 
once popular poet, ** Clementine. " 

This shelter for her declining years was provided 

115 



Literary Rambles 

by admiring friends at a time when an apoplexy 
had disabled her for the physical tasks by which 
she had maintained her household. The same ac- 
cident so diminished her literary productiveness that 
comparatively few of her tender and graceful poems 
were written in her present abode. In a poorer 
part of the city, a mile southward firom the '* pil- 
lared sign" of Gilder's ** Battle Monument," — 
the monument which her own poem of *<The 
Men of '76" helped to rear, — we find the 
humble dwelling that is most intimately associated 
with her literary career. It is one of a row of 
similar cheap two-storied wooden tenements, stand- 
ing beside the railway on Bridge Street near Union. 
When first we visited this house, a painted sign 
(now in possession of Mr. Gilder) was attached to the 
boards beside the door and displayed the words, 
*' Chairs Caned Here," and in the low-ceiled, 
scantily flirnished fi-ont room we found a weary- 
faced woman — *Mn calico garment and rough 
twisted hair" — toiling at the task which provided 
bread for a family of seven. To this room came 
Julia Ward Howe on the visit referred to in her 
poem ** To C. H.," and here before the low fire 
— ** the scanty rag-carpet sufficing her feet " — she 
talked of the queendom of this humbler sister of 
song. Hither, too, came Richard Watson Gilder 
and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, the erst-renowned poet 
of **The Sinless Child." 

1 16 



"Clementine's" Home and Poems 

In this poor place; chained to coarse and sordid 
surroundings from which her sensitive spirit shrank, 
compelled to uncongenial drudgery, always in pov- 
erty, sometimes in want, usually able to pay the 
rent only with a song, ** Clementine " bravely bore 
her burden until she sank beneath its weight. 
Toiling early and late, during those cruel years her 
chief solace and relief was found in the composition 
of the touching lyrics that have thrilled so many 
hearts. While she sang of many themes, the sad- 
dest of her numbers were too often the expressions 
of her own sorrows and the results of her own ex- 
periences : many of her stanzas "have fallen like 
tears upon the graves of her children," three of 
whom died in this lowly dwelhng ; some poems, like 
''Watching the Stars," pathetically portray her 
condition here and give utterance to her yearnings 
for congenial companionship and environment ; and 
one of exquisite tenderness, ** Thou Wilt Never 
Grow Old," is addressed to her best-beloved 
child, whom the agonized mother saw trampled to 
death on the pavement before this door. 

To ** Clementine," after those toilsome, troublous 
years, came noble recognition, friends, financial relief, 
and her Hfe in the cozy Wall Street cottage was 
one of comparative content and serenity. Her 
husband, the ** wan sulFerer " of her verse, died, 
but children and grandchildren were about her, and 
loving friends helped to fill her heart. Her hair 

117 



Literary Rambles 

was silvered and her step was slow, but she cher- 
ished the hopeful optimism of her younger days, 
and with it the divine spirit of song which animated 
her whole Hfe. 

So — Hving and feeling the poetry which she 
lately was seldom moved to write, and upborne by 
the faith and devotion which are breathed in <* The 
Passion Flower," "The Olive Star," '* Song of 
the Saints," and many another tender lyric — she 
awaited the summons to embark upon that unknown 
sea whose waters **roll round the world." But a 
few months ago that summons came. 



ii8 



ABROAD 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 



Thames-Side Literary Landmarks — A-von Vale — Stratford 
— The Birthplace — Neiv Place — Guild Chapel — 
Grammar School — Holy Trinity Church — The Tomb — 
Memorial — Dr. Hall — Red Horse Inn — Hathaivay 
Cottage — Where Shakespeare ivas Married — Other 
Shrines. 

TN faring to the Shakespeare shrines of Warwick- 
shire we love to follow, so far as we may, the 
valley of the Thames. From the London haunts 
of the myriad-minded bard, the places of his theaters 
and residences on Bankside and Ludgate Hill, we 
may trace the course of his many journeys between 
the metropoHs and his Stratford home. If we fol- 
low more closely the storied river, our way is 
redolent of Hterary associations. We stroll and 
loiter in Chelsea, with its memories of Carlyle and 
Rossetti ; Fulham, the sometime home of Hook, 
Richardson, Bulwer, and Swinburne, and the bur- 
ial-place of Vincent Bourne ; Putney, where Gibbon 
was born and Hunt died ; Barn Elms Park, where 
Cowley and Cobbett dwelt and the <*Kit Cat 
Club ' ' assembled ; Hammersmith, where Marryat 
lived and Thomson wrote ; Chiswick, with its home 
and grave of Hogarth. Farther we find the 
Twickenham of Pope, Walpole, and Fielding ; the 
haunts of "Junius ' ' ; the tombs of Thomson, Kean, 

121 



Literary Rambles 

and Matthew Arnold; the riverside scenes amid 
which Shelley wrote "The Revolt of Islam"; the 
ivy-clad church where Tennyson was married. At 
sleepy little Ewelme Chaucer sojourned, at Oxford 
he laid his '« Milleres Tale," about and above Ox- 
ford are the river-views which inspired some of the 
best of Arnold's verse, at Godstow Scott's **Fair 
Rosamond ' ' first met her royal lover, Cumnor 
was the place of the murder of Amy Robsart in 
**Kenilworth," Kelmscott Manor was for some 
years the joint residence of Rossetti and William 
Morris, Lechlade is the scene of Shelley's beautiful 
* * Summer- Evening Churchyard . ' ' 

Beyond these shrines we leave the *■* River of the 
Poets" and cross the green Cotswold ridge into 
the valley where the silver Avon ''Exhilarates the 
Meads." All this region is dominated by the 
memory and genius of Shakespeare ; and whatever 
may be the primary and ostensible object of our 
literary prowlings here — whether historic Warwick 
or storied Compton Wynyates, the home of Dyer, 
the birthplace of Butler, or the tomb of Somerville, 
Hughes' Rugby, Scott's *'Kenilworth," George 
Eliot's **Loamshire" or Miss Mulock's ** Norton 
Bury" — our pilgrimages inevitably end at the cot- 
tage where the great world-poet was born and the 
church beside the Avon where his ashes are en- 
tombed 

122 



Shakespeare and Stratford 

A winsome way we follow the windings of the 
placid Avon, flowing between willow-fringed mar- 
gins and through a broad valley bounded by low, 
undulating hills, to find amid flower-starred mea- 
dows the ancient borough which the genius of one 
man has made famous forever. Of Stratford Shake- 
speare is the sole glory and boast ; as we traverse the 
old streets we find everywhere evidences of the 
regard which prizes and preserves every memento 
of him who made the tranquil town — otherwise 
unvisited and unheard-of — an object of reverent 
pilgrimage to the cultured of all nations and climes. 

The population has multiplied since Shakespeare' s 
time, and some of the fields through which he 
strayed have disappeared beneath modern dwellings ; 
but the lapsing centuries have spared many of the 
structures he knew, and the old house in Hen- 
ley Street, hallowed by tradition as his birthplace, 
is religiously preserved. Its half-timbered, rough- 
plastered walls and massive chimney-pile are likely 
to endure through other centuries to come. Beneath 
this roof-tree we are received more like guests than 
tourists, and the sympathetic demeanor of the custo- 
dians, the familiar aspect of the rooms and the 
precious associations of which we are joint inher- 
itors with the whole English-speaking race, make 
this seem less a "show-place" than many others 
to which our rambles lead. 

123 



Literary Rambles 

Here we see the family room with its low ceiling 
and massive beams, its rude stone pavement — 
broken during the occupancy of the room as a 
butcher-shop — and its huge fireplace with a seat 
wrought in the masonry whereon the lad Shake- 
speare may have often sat, linking fancy unto fancy 
as he gazed upon the images in the fire. Behind 
this room is a ruder kitchen, and beside it, in the 
apartment which was once John Shakespeare's 
** woolshop," and where the boy doubtless assisted 
at his father's trade after he had left school and his 
sire had fallen into financial straits, is the museum 
and library. Here are preserved deeds to and 
firom Shakespeare's father, pieces of Shakespeare's 
mulberry tree, his declaration in a suit brought by 
him against Philip Rogers to recover the price of 
malt sold to the latter, the letter of Richard Quiney 
— whose son married Shakespeare's daughter, 
Judith — sohciting fi-om **his loveing good Friend 
and Countryman, Mr. Wm. Shackespere," the 
loan of thirty pounds, and, among numerous relics 
of less certain authenticity, the decrepit and worm- 
eaten desk at which Shakespeare is said to have sat 
in the grammar-school, and the signet-ring, with 
the initials «' W. S." bound with a true lover's knot, 
which was found some years ago near the church- 
yard and is believed to have been lost by Shake- 
speare just before the execution of his will, thus ne- 

124 



The Birthplace 

cessitating the substitution of the word "hand" 
for the effaced word **seal" in that document. 

From the kitchen well-worn stairs wind upward to 
the humble apartment where the immortal poet was 
born. It is a dingy room of moderate size, dimly 
lighted from the front by a quaint multi-paned case- 
ment said to contain many of the original glasses ; mas- 
sive timbers strut from its low roof and rib its rough 
walls, the sagging plaster of its ceiling is sustained 
by a curious network of steel laths, the original 
planks and nails of its uncarpeted floor are worn and 
polished by feet of innumerable pilgrims who in this 
poor chamber do homage to the colossal genius that 
was incarnated here. Many thousands of votaries 
have here inscribed their autographs until every inch 
of ceiling is discolored and every old window-pane 
is dimmed by them. **W. Scott" is among the 
signs-manual scratched upon the window, and the 
plastering bears, or has borne, the names of hun- 
dreds of others whom the world has known and 
honored ; some of these signatures have flaked from 
the surface, others have been repeatedly overwritten, 
and it is as much by the eye of faith as of vision 
that we decipher names like Byron, Walton, Dick- 
ens, Irving, Thackeray, Tennyson, Bayard Taylor, 
etc. Here is a copy of the Stratford bust of Shake- 
speare, near the door is a brick frreplace with huge 
timber mantel-tree, in one corner stands the chair 

125 



Literary Rambles 

of which Irving wrote, and other antique articles of 
furniture are settled against the walls. Large pipes 
laid along the floors are filled with hot water con- 
veyed from the custodian's cottage for heating the 
rooms, no fires or artificial lights being permitted 
beneath this sacred roof. The danger of its destruc- 
tion by fire has been further diminished by the 
demolition of the structures which formerly adjoined 
it upon either side. 

The house stands at the border of the street, 
before it in Shakespeare's youth was the ** muck- 
hill ' ' whose too great accumulation caused his 
father to be amerced by the health authorities of the 
time. The space beside and behind the dwelling, 
where then stood the father's tan-pits and out- 
buildings, is now a neat garden with sward and 
pleasant shrubbery, and here grow flowers that 
Shakespeare loved and whose fi-agrance breathes 
through many stanzas of his works. 

The ancient dwelling at the near-by corner of 
High Street was for thirty-six years the abode of 
Shakespeare's second daughter, Judith, whom Wil- 
liam Black idealized in the story bearing her name ; 
a front of stucco now conceals its picturesque tim- 
bers, but we may see the rooms she inhabited and, 
beneath them, the cellar, with walls five feet in 
thickness, in which her husband, Thomas Quiney, 
the vintner, kept his casks long years after its dark 

126 



Judith Shakespeare — New Place 

vault had ceased to be the dungeon of the borough 
prison. But a few steps distant dwelt her neigh- 
bor and friend, Katherine Rogers, mother of the 
founder of our great Harvard University, and 
among the quaint old houses of this haunted High 
Street are two which were sometime occupied hy 
Shakespeare's crony, Julius Shaw, — witness signa- 
tory to his will, — and often visited by the bard. 
The first of these is next door but one to New 
Place, the other, much altered, faces it from the 
opposite side of the street and for centuries has been 
an inn. 

Of Shakespeare's beloved New Place, once the 
largest and handsomest residence in the town, not 
much remains. The great garden, whose avenues 
the poet paced while he pondered some of his 
noblest dramas, and which then extended to the 
shining waters of the Avon, is contracted to a few 
rods of lawn. Within the inclosure and upon the 
exact site of its ancestor grows a mulberry, a scion 
of the famous tree which Shakespeare planted and 
sat under, and which Rev. Francis Gastrell — whom 
Rossetti, in a poem written here, characterized as 
** the supreme unhung " — destroyed because Shake- 
spearian admirers persisted in visiting it. Of the 
spacious and dignified mansion **of bricke and 
tymbre ' ' which Shakespeare restored and inhabited, 
little beside the decaying fragments of its foundation 

127 



Literary Rambles 

walls, which are protected by frames set in the 
sward, is now to be seen: such pares of the hal- 
lowed abode as had been spared by the previous 
owner were razed — in order to avoid a tax for 
charitable purposes — by the same ** reverend" 
vandal that felled the mulberry and thus ''damned 
himself to eternal fame." 

The well from which the poet drank and which 
was in the cellar of his house still remains and is 
now picturesquely embowered with ivy. In this 
well and about the old foundations have been found 
a number of relics and curiosities which are pre- 
served in the adjoining house, which was once the 
home of Shakespeare's granddaughter, wife to the 
son of his friend Anthony Nash. Despite the 
meagerness of its remains, we find New Place one 
of the most impressive of the shrines sanctified by 
association with the world's greatest poet : in boy- 
hood he well knew this, *<the great house*' of the 
town — he passed it daily on his way to school — 
and to possess it may have been one of the ambi- 
tions of his early life ; he purchased and repaired it 
as soon as his means would permit ; to it he made 
prolonged visits from London, during one of which 
he gave his favorite daughter, Susanna, to the man 
of her choice ; here he spent the closing years of 
his too brief life crowned by the love of his family 
and associates ; here, but two months before his 

128 



Shakespeare at New Place 

death, he blessed the winsome Judith's wedding ; 
here, upon his birthday — the festival of St. George 

— he passed to **the undiscovered country from 
whose bourn no traveler returns ' ' ; here gathered 
sorrowing friends to look once more upon his face 
before it should be hidden forever ; hence he was 
borne to his burial. 

Here, too, in the ripeness of his years and the 
meridian of his powers, he produced wondrous 
works like **The Tempest," **Cymbeline," and 
**A Winter's Tale"; and, as we drink from his 
well and linger among the roses of his garden and 
sit beneath the whispering foliage of the mulberry, 
we love to remember that in this retirement his 
peerless fancy beheld some of its inspired visions — 
that here ''first waved the mystic wand of 
Prospero, and Ariel sang of dead men's bones 
turned into pearls and corals, here arose into ever- 
lasting life Hermione, and here Miranda and 
Perdita — twins of heaven's own radiant goodness 

— were created." 

Looking forth from his windows or from the 
shade of his garden, the object most familiar to the 
vision of Shakespeare was the antique Guild Chapel 
which, with its buttressed walls, its mullioned win- 
dows, its Norman porch and square tower of gray 
stone, still stands beyond the narrow Chapel Lane. 
Its great bell, recast and still in use, summoned 
I 129 



Literary Rambles 

him to school in his childhood, sounded the curfew 
every evening of his life, and solemnly tolled v^hen 
he died. With the chapel's classical interior he 
v^as not less famihar, for he held sittings there, and 
there he was sometime a pupil during the repair of 
the school-room next door ; to the latter experience 
has been attributed the phrase *'a school i' the 
church" which he employs in '* Twelfth Night." 
The quaint old Guild Hall, adjoining the chapel, 
in which the poet probably first witnessed a 
theatrical performance, was recently restored and 
we now see the long, low room with its stone 
floor and oaken paneling essentially ' the same as 
Shakespeare knew it. The school-room above has 
now its many-paned windows, hacked benches and 
desks, high-pitched roof, and dark framework of 
rough-hewn rafters and beams as in the time when 
he, with * * shining morning face, ' ' daily came at 
early morn for a twelve-hours' pursuit of the *' Small 
Latine and less Greeke " which Jonson allows him. 
The lad had learned to read before he was admit- 
ted to the school, but here doubtless he conned 
some of those records of romantic deeds which he 
subsequently metamorphosed into the matchless 
dramas. During most of the period of Shake- 
speare's pupilage here his master was Sir Thomas 
Hunt, curate of Luddington, and we find the 
quaint and venerable cottage in which he dwelt 

130 



Guild Chapel — School- — The Church 

still standing just behind the theater of his peda- 
gogic labors. 

Reverently we trace the course of the mournflil 
procession which bore the coffined form of the poet 
from his home to his sepulcher — out of the gates 
of New Place, along the shady highway, past the 
school of his boyhood, past the abode of his 
daughter, across the silent churchyard, under the 
arching limes, through the carven porch, out of the 
bright sunshine into enduring dusk. 

The ancient temple that guards the dust of 
Shakespeare is the literary Mecca of all mankind. 
Its gray walls rise from the marge of the peacefril 
Avon, protected by clustering elms and yew trees 
that whisper above the mossy marbles and the 
moldering heaps of the old churchyard where 
Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, sleeps in an unmarked 
grave. The edifice is an eiFective architectural 
blending of the early English with the graceful 
Norman- Gothic, erected and restored at different 
periods, with fine windows, embattled roofs, and a 
square central tower surmounted by a spire which 
rises high above the tree-tops, a fair landmark in 
all the countryside. An avenue, paved with 
ancient gravestones, whose worn inscriptions are 
scarcely legible, and bordered by fragrant Hme 
trees through whose overarching foliage the sunlight 

131 



Literary Rambles 

flecks and freckles the shadowy floor, leads to the 
church door. 

The renovations and "improvements" of re- 
cent years have considerably changed the interior, 
but in the solemn twilight o£ the place we find all 
the objects we seek. Near the entrance is the an- 
cient parish register with its record of the baptism 
and burial of Shakespeare; in the opposite aisle is 
the broken font at which he was christened. This 
tastefully carved relic was long since rescued from 
the base use to which it had come — it was a 
watering-trough at a pump — and restored to the 
sanctuary, though not to its pristine place, and 
from its crumbling bowl a son of Joseph Jefferson 
was baptized twenty-five years ago, and named 
WiUiam Winter after our American poet and critic. 

Pacing the length of the dim nave, we find in 
the chancel the slab which covers the handfiil of 
ashes which was once the earthly vesture of the 
greatest intellect humanity has known. The plain 
flat stone is laid in the pavement before the altar, 
where rainbow light from the great chancel window 
falls upon it and illumines the familiar and much- 
debated words of prayer and solemn execration that 
are graven upon its surface. Looking upon these 
rugged and pathetic lines while he bends above the 
dust of the ''Star of Poets," the pilgrim feels little 
patience with the witless attempt to read into them 

132 



The Tomb of Shakespeare 

the declaration that Shakespeare was murdered to 
prevent his confession that his works were the 
product of another. We rejoice that the awfiil in- 
scription — whether written by the poet or the 
undertaker — has served to keep his remains here 
in the spot where he longed to lie among the loved 
associations of his life, and to protect his tomb not 
only from the profane desecration he dreaded, but 
from more venial disturbance — no one daring to 
open it, although Shakespeare's wife and daughter 
*'did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave 
with him.'* 

Beside him on the left, close to the wall, lies his 
wife, on the right his daughter Susanna sleeps be- 
neath an inscription eulogistic of her charity, wis- 
dom, and goodness; in the same row are the graves 
of members of her family, and near by we see the 
efEgied tomb of Shakespeare' s friend, John Combe, 
upon whom the poet is believed to have composed 
a facetious epitaph. In a niche of the north wall, 
just above the grave of Shakespeare, is the well- 
known monumental bust, made from a death-mask 
and erected by his family not long after his death, 
which is the most authentic and impressive memento 
of the **Swan of Avon," save only his unequaled 
compositions. Its original colors have been re- 
stored, and we may measurably see the flesh-tints 
of his face and hands, the hazel of his eyes, the 

133 



Literary Rambles 

warm auDurn of his hair and pointed beard, the 
black and red of his garb, as they appeared to his 
friends in life. From the same side-wall the 
** American window" looks down upon the poet's 
grave; it is the gift of transatlantic visitors, and 
its beautifiil panes represent by Scriptural subjects 
Shakespeare's seven ages of man, as described in 
**As You Like It." Other objects, antique and 
storied, here abound, but in this sacred place we 
regard only the things which pertain to Shakespeare; 
the edifice itself, solemn and impressive as an an- 
cient Christian church, is for us but the mausoleum 
which forever keeps the discarded cerements of his 
celestial genius. 

So, too, the town with its industries and its 
thriving thousands of people, has for us but a single 
interest — Shakespeare. And we are not allowed 
to neglect that interest here, for never did mediaeval 
city employ the prestige of its saint more advan- 
tageously than does Stratford the fame of its im- 
mortal son. We hear his name everywhere, in 
the streets, the shops, the market-place, on the 
lips of touters and tourists; we see it blazoned on 
inns, stores, banks, factories; the manufacture and 
sale of Shakespearian mementos are conspicuous ac- 
tivities of the place. Through old streets, teeming 
with Shakespearean sign-boards, trades-marks and 
effigies, we stroll to other spots less intimately con- 
nected with the poet than those earlier visited. 

134 



Dr. Hall — Shakespeare Memorial 

A picturesque gabled and bay- windowed house 
still standing near the site of the Priests' College, 
was the home of his eldest daugher, Susanna, wife 
of John Hall, the physician who probably attended 
the poet in his last illness, and made the death-mask 
from his face. Unfortunately the earliest entries in 
Dr. Hall's case-book date from the year following 
Shakespeare's death, but he quaintly records the 
illnesses of the poet's daughter and granddaughter, 
and the godmother of Judith Shakespeare, the wife 
of his friend Nash, and the son of his friend Quiney, 
etc. Also the case of Shakespeare's associate 
Drayton — **an excellent poet, treated for a tertian 
with a mixture which wrought upwards and down- 
wards." 

On the place of the Rother Market, where John 
Shakespeare purchased materials for his business, is 
the beautiful memorial fountain, the appropriate gift 
of the late George W. Childs, of Philadelphia, for 
whose dedication one of Holmes's last poems was 
written. Within the original grounds of New 
Place, and not far from the site of Shakespeare's 
barn, which was subsequently converted into a 
theater, the "Shakespeare Memorial" lifts its 
sightly tower and its steep roofs and pinnacles from 
Avon's bank, midway between the many-arched 
Clopton Bridge and the church of the poet's sep- 
ulcher. About the building lies an ornamental 
park, with pleasant alleys winding among lawns. 



Literary Rambles 

foliage, and flowers, and within its red-brick walls 
are a library with thousands of volumes and manu- 
scripts of Shakespearean literature, an art gallery 
which includes among its treasures the Marcus 
Droeshout portrait and the beautiful Davenant bust, 
and a theater where, in April of each year, are 
presented the famous birth-week performances of 
Shakespeare's plays. 

If we follow the example of that pioneer of 
American literary pilgrims, Washington Irving, and 
lodge at the ancient Red Horse Inn, we may 
occupy the chamber that once was his, sit in his little 
parlor, '*some twelve feet square," and see (but no 
longer handle) the arm-chair and poker which figure 
as Geoffrey Crayon's throne and scepter in the 
initial reverie of his charming sketch. The cozy, 
old-fashioned hostelry was well-known to Shake- 
speare ; doubtless Jonson, Drayton, and Burbage 
lodged there in his day, as did Betterton and Gar- 
rick long decades later. Its opulent registers bear 
such names as Longfellow, Ripley, Gerald Massey, 
Artemus Ward, Bayard Taylor, Edmund Yates, 
Elihu Burritt, William Winter, Charles Dudley 
Warner, and many more of the guild of letters. 

A sunny summer morning finds us strolling 
through fields aflame with scarlet poppies to the 
home of "sweet Anne Hathaway," at Shottery. 
The rural footpath is the same so often trodden by 

136 



Red Horse Inn — Hathaway Cottage 

the impatient feet of young Shakespeare hastening to 
his sweetheart ; beside it bloom the same wild- 
flowers he saw, above it birds warble the same song 
of love that gladdened his heart. We follow the 
windings of the path among fertile ploughlands and 
lush green meadows and along fragrant hedgerows 
to a brook, murmuring beneath tall trees, and find, 
a few rods beyond, the famous cottage. It is a 
long, low, thick-thatched, half-timbered tenement, 
shaded by trees and buried in vines which cover 
the oaken ribs and rugged plastering of its walls and 
clamber upon its humble roof. Before it is an 
ample garden with prim beds of shrubs and old- 
fashioned flowers through which an uneven path of 
flagstones leads to the leafy, moss-grown well and 
to the quaint doorway. 

Beneath this roof time has wrought most gently ; 
the floor of flags, the great blackened fireplace with 
its wide hearth, oaken mantel, and snug chimney- 
corners, the curious casements, the low ceiling trav- 
ersed by heavy beams, endure unchanged by the 
centuries that have elapsed since this lowly place 
was the scene of Shakespeare's wooing. In the 
living-room a decayed high-backed settle, on which 
the lovers may have sat together, stands by the 
fireside, a worn Bible with the Hathaway family 
record lies upon an old table, other articles of 
ancient fiirniture are at hand and, here, too, is a 

137 



Literary Rambles 

voluminous register with the signatures of illustrious 
visitors — Dickens, Longfellow, Tennyson, Con- 
way, Mark Lemon, William Black, Wilkie Collins, 
Mark Twain, and many others. In the chamber 
roofed by the low, sloping thatch and hghted by 
diminutive casements beneath the eaves are preserved 
an antique four-post bedstead, carved in curious 
fashion, a case of drawers, a spinning stool, vari- 
ous articles of homespun linen, and other objects said 
to have once belonged to Anne Hathaway. The 
**last descendant of the Hathaway s," the soft- 
voiced Mrs. Baker, who so long occupied the cot- 
tage and displayed its contents with such manifest 
pleasure and pride, is dead, and the pilgrim who 
now revisits this shrine will miss her kindly wel- 
come and her pleasant chat concerning her belong- 
ings and her distinguished visitors, will recall the 
grateful draught she brought from the old well under 
the laurel and will long cherish her parting present 
of "rosemary for remembrance" from ** sweet 
Anne's" garden. Not far from the Hathaway 
cottage is *' a bank whereon the wild thyme grows " 
and the old manor house in whose attic was the 
Catholic chantry where, as has been believed, 
Shakespeare was first and secretly married. 

Other and farther scenes allure our steps : Char- 
lecote with its stately Elizabethan hall on the brink 
of Avon, and its park whence the poet did not 

138 



Other Shakespeare Scenes 

steal the deer — there were no deer there in Shakes- 
peare* s youth ; the riverside hamlet of Luddington 
with the place of the little church where the poet 
was probably married with Protestant rites by Sir 
Thomas Hunt, erst his master m the grammar- 
school ; the quaint-gabled cottage of stuccoed stone 
at Wilmcote, with its ancient dove-cote, spacious 
farm-yards, and prim flower-garden, where Shake- 
speare's mother, the heiress Mary Arden, was 
born and reared ; the picturesque, cross-timbered, 
dormer-windowed Shakespeare Hall — reputed 
abode of the poet' s uncle — within whose ivied 
walls Shakespeare sojourned, and where, in the 
chamber above the entrance, local tradition avers, 
he wrote **As You Like It" on the confines of 
that forest of Arden where its scenes are laid. But 
during all our loiterings in and about Stratford — 
whether we float upon the silver flood of Avon 
or, following the footsteps of the bard, we wander 
the willow-guarded banks or thread leafy lanes 
fringed with ** daisies pied and violets blue," or 
linger in flower-flecked field, or rest on sightly hill- 
top — our vision ever turns to the dreamfiil spire 
which rises amid the landscape and marks the place 
of Shakespeare's never-ending rest. 



139 



BYRON'S HARROW: 
KENSAL GREEN 



Some London Shrines — Grtj-ves of Thackeray, Hunt, Sydney 
Smithy Hood, Mrs. Haivthorne, Dickens's Little Nell, 
etc. — Harroiv School — Eminent Pupils — Byron'' s School- 
room — Relics — Resorts — His School Days and Friends 
— His Daughter"" s Gra've — His Mary — Vieiv from 
Hill. 

"DERHAPS the most enjoyable of the many 
pleasant outings in the near neighborhood of 
great London is the walk from the city, by way of 
Paddington and Kensal Green, to ancient Harrow- 
on-the-Hill, — the Harewe-atte-Hull of the Saxons. 
From mid-London our way lies along Oxford 
Street, — the highway apostrophized by the bril- 
liant Opium- Eater as the **stoney-hearted step- 
mother that listeneth to the sighs of orphans and 
drinketh the tears of children," — past Soho Square 
where the truant De Quincey lived in direst pov- 
erty, Hazlitt died with Lamb at his bedside, and 
where we lately found Sir Walter Besant engaged 
upon his magnum opus, the ** Survey of London,'* 
in an apartment which looks out upon the foliage 
of the square ; past the place of the shop where De 
Quincey purchased his first opium, and < * Closet 
Court" where lodged the Tittlebat Titmouse of 
Warren's **Ten Thousand a Year"; past the 

140 



London Literary Shrines 

birthplace of Byron and Hanover Square where 
Dickens's Ralph Nickleby dwelt; past Wimpole 
Street where EHzabeth Barrett Hved prior to her 
marriage with Browning, Grosvenor Square, some- 
time abode of Bulwer, and Orchard Street where 
**the greatest of the many Smiths*' once dwelt, 
and where Sheridan wrote **The Duenna" and 
*'The Rivals." 

Beyond Oxford Street our way leads us to the 
last London home of Dickens, where a part of 
** Edwin Drood" was written, to the dismal cem- 
etery where the sentimental Sterne was laid in a 
grave which was doomed to desecration, to the 
tomb of Mrs. Siddons, and through the region 
where once stood the great dust-heaps — ** continents 
of cinders" Carlyle called them — among which 
Dickens located the Boffin's Bower of '^Our 
Mutual Friend." 

The first hour fi-om Hyde Park brings us to that 
populous retreat of the dead, Kensal Green Ceme- 
tery. Within its dull inclosing walls sleep many 
votaries of literature and art, whose fame will not 
die. As we traverse the paths on the sunny slopes 
and along the wave-Hke sweeps of sward, we find 
the revered graves where these our dead repose 
beneath memorials of enduring love and remem- 
brance. Amid the silence of the place we seek in 
vain for the spot where sweet little Rosey New- 

141 



Literary Rambles 

come was here laid with her child, ''out of sight 
of an unkind world," but we find the tomb of her 
gentle and genial creator, Thackeray, a modest 
tomb, inscribed only with his name and years, to 
which he — **the prose Juvenal of his time" — was 
borne by a great concourse and consigned by loving 
friends. Browning, Dickens, Leech, Cruikshank, 
Trollope, Millais, and others who knew his worth, 
on one winter day thirty-eight years ago. Near 
Thackeray lies his school-fellow and life-long friend, 
John Leech, who quickly followed him in the 
eternal march, and farther away lies Motley the 
historian. 

In the same inclosure we find the grave of Mil- 
lais whom his firiend Du Maurier, the ** Thackeray 
of a later age," celebrated as the Laird in the fas- 
cinating tale of *< Trilby," and as we stand above 
his ashes we remember that this is the fancied 
place of entombment of poor Trilby herself, shriven 
in suffering, and we wonder how many of the 
thousands who sleep about us here beneath holy 
texts and laudatory epitaphs could have cast a stone 
at her, how many of them conformed to their saintly 
ideals as faithfully as did she to her simple 
standard, — **to think of other people before her- 
self and never to tell lies or be afraid." 

The grave of the sweet-souled and cheery Leigh 
Hunt is made in a spot chosen by himself and is 

142 



Kensal Green — Literary Graves 

marked by his sculptured bust. An elevated tomb 
of freestone, guarded by an iron railing, is set in the 
sward near the north walk in memory of the witty 
essayist, Sidney Smith ; its inscription describes 
him as * * One of the Best of Men ' ' and shows that 
he sleeps here between his v/ife and the son whose 
early death was the first great sorrow of his father's 
life. Farther westward by this walk we approach 
the neglected and apparently forgotten grave of the 
poet Allan Cunningham. 

In the midst of one crowded row of memorials 
is the place where poor Tom Hood rests after a life 
that was but one long truceless struggle with pain 
and disease. His monument, an upright altar-stone 
surmounted by a bust, was erected by a popular 
subscription proposed by Eliza Cook, and was un- 
veiled by Lord Houghton in the presence of a com- 
pany of literators. Shrubbery shades his stone, 
tall trees sway in the breeze above it, and upon its 
chiseled surface we read the touching epitaph writ- 
ten by himself: **He sang * The Song of the 
Shirt.' " The gifted Mrs. Jameson reposes with 
her parents in a little-regarded grave not far away, 
and, amid the maze of sculptured stones, beneath 
the sunlit sod or in the shade of sighing foliage, we 
find the sepulchers of Eastlake, the historian of art, 
and Buckle, the historian of civilization, of Mul- 
ready and Gibson, of Tietjens and Charles Mathews. 

H3 



Literary Rambles 

Here Americans will seek out the spot, on a 
verdant hillside which slopes toward the rising sun, 
where the wife of Hawthorne and his first-born, 
the unfortunate Una, — born under the mosses of 
the *' Old Manse," — lie in the last long sleep. 
Mrs. Hawthorne died in London in 1 871, while 
preparing for publication *' Doctor Grimshawe's 
Secret." On her white marble headstone is in- 
scribed: ** Sophia, Wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne " ; 
on her footstone, *' I am the Resurrection and the 
Life." Six years after Mrs. Hawthorne's death, 
poor Una died in a cell of a religious retreat near 
Windsor, and was laid here beside her mother. 
Above them here grow ivy from their far ** Way- 
side" home at Concord, and periwinkle — brought 
by Julian Hawthorne from the grave on *' that hill- 
top hearsed with pines, ' ' where the subtle romancer 
lies with the ocean rolHng between him and those 
whom he so fondly loved. Another spot attracts us 
in this city of the dead ; it is the place where Dickens 
once desired to be buried beside the prototype of 
the Little Nell of his "Old Curiosity Shop." She 
was his beloved Mary Hogarth, a younger sister 
of his wife, and sometime an inmate of his home ; 
he buried her here, and the epitaph which marks 
her gravestone was penned by his hand : ** Young, 
Beautiful, and Good, God in his mercy numbered 
her among his angels at the early age of seventeen." 

144 



Eminent Harrovians 

Beyond the cemetery pleasant ways lead us 
through a pleasant country, inlaid with patches of 
emerald and gold, which becomes more hilly as 
we proceed, until we reach the sloping hilltop 
where England has set up, hke a pagan shrine, one 
of her ancient seminaries. Harrow was already old 
when the Normans landed on English shores ; and 
her famous school, founded in 1 5 7 1 by a yeoman, 
John Lyon, has for more than three centuries main- 
tained a rank scarcely second to Eton, and has 
numbered among its pupils many who became emi- 
nent as authors or statesmen. Five Harrovians — 
Spencer Perceval, Goderich, Robert Peel (whose 
<* Papers" were but recently published), Aberdeen 
and Palmerston — have been within the last ninety 
years Premiers of England. 

Among the authors of which the ancient school 
can boast are Sheridan, Hook, Sir William Jones, 
the orientalist. Parr, the critic, personal friend of 
Dr. Johnson, Bruce, the Abyssinian traveler, 
Morris, the Jesuit historian, and Anthony TroUope. 
The latter, in his autobiography, speaks with much 
bitterness of his pupilage at Harrow and of his 
utterly friendless condition there. A school-fellow 
has revealed to us the reasons for '<old Trollope's" 
ostracism. A story was current that his father had 
been outlawed, and this prejudiced every loyal 
pupil against him ; besides, his manners were rude 



Literary Rambles 

and uncouth, he was the dullest member of his 
class — ** an incorrigible dunce" — and the dirtiest 
boy both in dress and person in the whole school. 
Those of us who, earlier in life^ have enjoyed his 
many pleasing tales should be gladdened by the 
further testimony of Gregory's *' Memoirs'* that 
Trollope in his school-days was honest and brave ; 
his faults were external, *'all the rest of him was 
right enough." An ancestor of Thackeray was for 
several years Head Master of the school. 

But Harrow's real hero and genius is Byron. 
Here he was for five years **as troublesome and 
mischievous a pupil as ever wearied the heart of a 
master" ; Harrow is the beloved "Ida" of the 
earlier poems of his ** Hours of Idleness," the 

"Sweet scene of his youth, 
Seat of Friendship and Truth, 
Where love chased each fast fleeting year" ; 

and it is his associations with this place that have 
drawn us hither in the progress of our bookish 
prowlings. 

Most of the school buildings are of comparatively 
recent construction, but the original school-room, 
provided for by the founder and erected in the 
Decorated Tudor style, remains, and with its opu- 
lence of reminiscences is the great object of interest. 
It was to this historic Fourth Form room, which 

146 



Fourth Form Room 

was already old in Byron's day, that he, loud warned 
by the bell, resorted 

*' To pore o'er the precepts by pedagogues taught." 

It is a long, narrow, and gloomy apartment, with 
high, latticed windows, a wide fireplace, quaint old 
benches, and dark wainscoting which is thickly 
covered with names of pupils, rudely graven by 
hands that for generations have lain in dust. 
There are hundreds of these names remaining ; nu- 
merous others, some of them old and famous, 
have disappeared beneath modern Smiths and 
Browns. When we reflect that this defacement of 
the walls was forbidden, we are appalled by the 
amount of flogging which the myriad of autograph 
carvings represents. 

The name first shown to the visitor is that of 
Byron, cut in large irregular characters in the dark 
corner at the right of the fireplace ; just beneath is 
Wildman's; in the end wall is Peel's; opposite to 
the fireplace and near each other we read the names, 
**S. Perceval," **Haddo" (Aberdeen), and *'W. 
Jones." Newer panels cover now the ancient 
plastering above the wainscot, and upon these the 
names of recent Harrovians are graven in more 
regular order. In the early days all the classes re- 
cited in this room; now only the Saturday morning 
prayers are said in it, and it is otherwise unused save 

H7 



Literary Rambles 

as a place of flagellation of the boys by the Haed 
Master. 

Among the few mementos of Byron preserved 
at Harrow are his sword and Greek knife, the Pisa 
portrait by West, the revised proofs of his **Ode 
to Napoleon Buonaparte," his volume of Lucanus, 
his well-thumbed school copy of ^schylus, with 
marginal annotations in his school-boy hand. A 
school translation from this volume is included 
among his published works. The markings in his 
books indicate that his knowledge of Greek was so 
scant that he feared to trust to his memory for the 
meanings of the most common words. A more in- 
teresting object is pointed out as ** Byron's tomb," 
a low, broad tombstone beneath a giant elm tree 
near the footpath on the brow of the hill in 
the ancient churchyard. It bears the unpoetic 
name of Peachey, and is now protected from the 
eagerness of pilgrims by an unsightly and unro- 
mantic covering of iron rods. Its situation com- 
mands an enchanting view, embracing the pic- 
turesque towers of imperial Windsor Castle, the 
spires of Eton, and the intervening expanse ot 
woods and smiling fields. This is the spot of 
which he so often wrote, the habitual resort of his 
evening leisure, to which he came 

**To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray." 
148 



The Byron Tomb 

Here he sat apart in a fairyland of his imagination 
and "mused the twilight hours away," weaving 
his day dreams into poesy while he looked over this 
charming landscape with eyes that saw it not. 
Byron's connection with this old tomb is celebrated 
in a school song which we once heard the boys sing- 
ing while we strolled in the churchyard : 

** Byron lay, lazily lay, 

Hid from lessons and games away, 

Dreaming poetry all alone 

Up a-top of the Peachey stone: 
All in a fury enters Drury, 

Sets him grammar and Virgil due j 
Poets should n't have, should n't have, should n't have, 

Poets should n't have work to do." 

Not far from this spot where Byron, in a poem 
composed upon the old tomb, wished himself to be 
laid at last, — 

*' Forever stretched beneath this mantling shade, 
Pressed by the turf where once my childhood played. 
Wrapt by the soil that veils the spot I loved. 
Mixed with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved," — 

repose the ashes of his natural daughter, Allegra. 
A score of years after his school-days were ended 
he wrote from Italy to his friend and publisher, 
Murray, describing this beloved spot of his youth 
and his associations with it, and desiring to have the 

149 



Literary Rambles 

child's remains entombed here. Perhaps he then 
thought he would finally return to this place. At 
the age of five the child had died at the convent of 
Bagna Cavallo, in the Romagna, where she, despite 
the protests of her mother (the *' Claire" of Shel- 
ley's journal and half-sister of Mary Wollstonecraft 
Shelley), had been placed to be educated. Near 
the font in the old church behind the Peachey 
tomb, Allegra, the sinless child of sin, reposes 
beneath the inscription: 

**I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me." 

At the side of the altar, within the communion 
rails. Sir Samuel Garth, the poet of **The Dispen- 
sary," is interred. The church itself is an object 
of interest, dating from the time of William the 
Conqueror, having been founded by Lanfi-anc and 
consecrated by Anselm. By reason of its com- 
manding and conspicuous site it has long been called 
''the visible church." 

Here at Harrow began some of the most fervid 
and enduring fi-iendships of Byron's life, notably 
that with Lord Clare, which lasted until his death. 
The stanzas of "Hours of Idleness" commencing, 
** Friend of my Youth," were addressed to Clare. 
The early death of John Wingfield, a form-fellow, 
occasioned the ''Epitaph on a Friend" in the 
same collection. Another poem, written here upon 

150 



Byron's School-Friends 

the old tomb, was applied to the Duke of Dorset, 
who seems to have stood next to Clare in Byron's 
affections. On the fly-leaf of one of his school- 
books the bold, boyish hand of Byron recorded, 
"Tom Wildman sits on my left hand," and in 
letters written many years afterward Byron recalls 
with manifest pleasure their close relations in the 
forms of Harrow. This same Wildman, a hero 
of Waterloo and the Peninsular war, purchased and 
rescued from ruin the bankrupt poet's ancestral 
Newstead. With another form-fellow, Robert 
Peel, who was just Byron's age, he was less inti- 
mate, but upon one occasion he offered to take half 
the flogging Peel was enduring from his fag-master. 
It has been said that, although less proficient in 
some branches at school, Byron was thought to be 
superior to Peel in general information. 

School tradition says that George Sinclair, the 
intellectual prodigy of the class, used to write 
Byron's exercises, and had his battles fought for 
him in return. The poet preferred ** hockey to 
Horace and 'duck-puddle' to Helicon." It 
must be confessed that his most brilliant successes at 
Harrow were pugilistic rather than scholarly ; one 
form-fellow testifies : *'I have seen him fight by 
the hour Hke a Trojan, and stand up against the 
disadvantage of his lameness with all the spirit of an 
ancient combatant." But his battles were as often 

151 



Literary Rambles 

those of younger and weaker boys as his own, and 
the scene of his exploits, the old ** milling-ground," 
where he fought the bullies of the school, is visited 
with interest. Despite his lameness, he played a 
creditable part in athletic sports, and was one of the 
Harrow eleven in the cricket match with Eton in 
1805. 

In after years Byron often referred to the latter 
part of his stay here as being the happiest period of 
his life, and his grief over his final departure from 
the school found plaintive expression in his verse. 
In a note to **Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" he 
wrote, "I hated Harrow until the last year and a 
half, and then I liked it. I so much disliked leaving 
Harrow that it broke my rest for the last quarter 
with counting the days that remained." His 
early unhappiness in the school was largely due to 
an aversion against his first teacher, Henry Drury, 
who apparently had good reasons for dissatisfaction 
with his pupil; for the lad who had been styled 
"the little deevil Geordie Byron" in Scotland had 
experienced no change of heart, and the Harrow 
masters complained of his idleness, negligence, and 
propensity to make others disregard their employ- 
ments, — Drury even spoke of him as a blackguard 
and threatened his expulsion, — yet they recognized 
his talents, and one of them predicted for him a 
career as an orator. Byron decHned an invitation 

152 



School Days — Byron's Mary 

(usually deemed a command) to dine with the 
Head Master, explaining that he ** should never 
think of asking Dr. Butler to dine with him at New- 
stead," and some of his first rhymes were bitter 
satires upon his teachers. 

It was during a Harrow vacation that Byron 
met and lost his heart to Mary Ann Chaworth, — 
his *« bright star of Annesley," the ''Mary" of 
many poems, '* the maiden" of his *« Dream," — 
and it is presumable that his * * ponderings " upon 
the old tomb were of a different character there- 
after, as the many stanzas he there wrote to and 
about her were inspired by a more perturbing 
emotion than the boyish friendships and antipathies 
which had before engaged his muse. 

His ill-fated passion for Miss Chaworth colored 
all his fliture life, influenced the character and the 
ineffable beauty of some of his best work, and drew 
from him those exquisite stanzas which have en- 
shrined her, like Petrarch's Laura, among the hero- 
ines of song. 

A description of Byron's personal appearance as 
a Harrow school-boy is of interest. His adult face 
was undoubtedly one of the handsomest, and it 
seems to have been assumed that he was, therefore, 
a handsome lad. Irving avers that, ** though boy- 
ish in years, he had a countenance of remarkable 
beauty," and most oi the biographers have led us 



Literary Rambles 

to infer that the boy bore in his face such indica- 
tions of beauty and genius that the taste or discern- 
ment of Miss Chaworth was somehow at fault, else 
she would have fancied him despite his ** fewer 
summers." Now this is the manner of boy he 
was when he essayed to make love to her : ugly, 
fat, lame, painfully stiff and bashful, inordinately 
vain and conceited, with manners rough and odd and 
with speech thickened by a Scottish dialect. Miss 
Pigot of Southwell, who knew him at the time, 
says of him : **With his cheeks encased in fat and 
his hair combed straight over his forehead, he 
looked such a perfect * gaby ' that I could not for- 
bear to tell him so." She found him ** insuffer- 
able" and a ** horror." It is scarcely surprising 
that the beautiful and mature heiress of Annesley 
preferred a gentleman of high social position, cul- 
ture, and manly accomplishments, like handsome 
Jack Musters, to this boy. Her choice was the 
natural and rational one, and resulted by no means 
so miserably as the world of readers has supposed. 
During Byron's last year at Harrow the lady mar- 
ried, leaving the poet a prey to ** feelings which a 
fiend might pity." 

The present (ninth) Lord Byron, grandnephew 
of Captain George Byron, the poet's cousin and 
successor, was a Harrow boy. So, also, was the 
poet's grandson, the surviving son of Ada Byron, 

154 



View from Harrow 

who inherited a peerage from the poet's widow, 
and who, a few years since, succeeded to the earl- 
dom of Lovelace through the death of Byron's 
son-in-law. 

From the elevation of the old church we over- 
look the landscape Byron knew so well, embracing 
great London with its suburbs, much of five of 
England' s populous counties, and many miles of the 
course of the Thames curving among green meadows 
and plantations. Southward and eastward we be- 
hold the spires of the metropolis, the stately dome 
of its cathedral, the palatial towers of Westminster, 
the sparkling roofs of the Crystal Palace, and an ex- 
panse of beautiful country, diversified with parks, 
villages, and picturesque seats, extending to the 
wavelike line of Surrey hills ; westward, near the 
verge of the horizon, rise the battlemented towers 
of Windsor, and away to the north stretch ranges of 
verdure-clad hills. 

Other indicated objects interest us more : the 
ancient mansion in which Wolsey lived when rector 
of Harrow ; the ** ivy-mantled tower" of Stoke 
Pogis church, which shadows the tomb of Gray and 
the country churchyard that inspired his * ' Elegy ' ' ; 
the village church where Handel was once organist, 
and the smithy, whose anvil-music suggested to 
him the idea of his ''Harmonious Blacksmith"; 
the grammar-school on Highgate Hill, beneath which 

155 



Literary Rambles 

poor Coleridge now sleeps without the aid of the 
baneful narcotic which wrought his ruin ; the gray 
tower of Hampstead church, and the Heath where 
Pope, Goldsmith, Dickens, Thackeray, and Du 
Maurier walked, and where Keats and Hogarth, 
Shelley and Leigh Hunt, Johnson and Akenside 
sometime dwelt. 



i':6 



THE GRAVE OF 
CHILDE HAROLD 



Hucknall-Torkard — Market-place — Ancient Church Tower 
— Recollections of Byron'' s Funeral — Perfunctory Cere- 
monial — The Byron Vault and Contents — The Poet and 
Ada — Joe Murray — Byron s Monument — His Daugh- 
ter'' s — Notable Visitors — La Guiccioli^ etc. 

TV /TAN Y of our literary rambles have been in the 
^ ^ track of the Pilgrim-poet : from his birth- 
place in London and other spots connected with 
his career in that metropolis, from the baronial 
'*hall of his fathers" and the loved haunts of his 
youth, we have followed the devious course of his 
wanderings over half a continent, to many a 
place that was a scene of his life and a theme of 
his song.i From these we turn to trace 

" the Pilgrim to the scene 
Which is his last," 

to end our Byron pilgrimage and doiFour *'sandal- 
shoon" and *' scallop-shell " at his grave. 

Two miles southward from Byron's ancestral 
Newstead, and as far from the fair abode of Mary 
Ann Chaworth, his "bright morning star of An- 
nesley," is Hucknall-Torkard, a dull, straggling 

1 See "A Literary Pilgrimage." 



Literary Rambles 

town, which the Count Gamba, Byron's com- 
panion in arms, once thought resembled the rude 
Grecian village in which the poet died. In the 
ancient parish church, dedicated long centuries ago 
to St. Mary Magdalene, lies the mortal part of the 
immortal author of " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." 
The square, gray church tower rises from an in- 
closure which the lapsing centuries have thickly- 
strewn with graves. Quaint mementos of affec- 
tion and grief, old gravestones and monuments all 
aslant and awry, crowd each other even to the wall 
which divides this God's Acre from the noisy 
market-place of the colliery town. 

Through a wicket in the wall we escape, by 
a single step, from the turbulent scene without, 
into the retreat of those who have finished their 
course and for whom life's fever is forever past. 
But the discordant cries of marketmen and the 
chaffering of the rough collier and the female of his 
kind about the defects of the wares exposed upon 
the stalls come to our ears as we sit among the 
dead, and follow us into the sacred fane whose 
chancel abuts upon the public mart. 

Some portions of the church have been restored 
and beautified since the poet was interred here, the 
chancel has been widened somewhat and transepts 
erected between it and the nave, but the Byron 
vault has not been disturbed, the western end of 

158 



> 

2 



n 




nt Gamba, Byr- m- 

e thought resemble de 

which the poet diea. lu the 
h, dedicated long centuries ago 
dene, hes the mortal part of the 
•' Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.'* 
hurch tower rises from an in- 
lapsing centuries have thickly 
Quaint ir, . ?ntos of affec- 
;^stone3 i. uiments all 

i other ^ he wall 

« iisy 

by 
ut, 
eir 



his 

ares cxpo8ed upon 

our cars as among the 

us into the sacrea fane whose 

?;he public mart. 

^ the church have been restored 

an.) the poet was interred here, the 

chai idened somewhat and transepts 

, .\ the nave, but the Byron 

curbed, the western end of 



The Byron Church 

the edifice remains unchanged, and the superb Nor- 
man tower, — for which has been claimed an an- 
tiquity of eight centuries, — with its massive walls 
and little spires, its stone battlements and mullioned 
windows, is dark and grim with age. Its fine 
proportions and the air of stately dignity which age 
has imparted would, in any situation, make it an 
impressive structure, but the low roofs which adjoin 
it and the general meanness of its environment 
render it doubly imposing here. We think it even 
beautiful this summer afternoon as the sunshine gleams 
aslant through its windows and adown its fissured 
and weather-stained walls, while we contemplate 
it firom our seat among the crumbling gravestones. 
Once, years ago, as we rested here upon the 
turf, sketching the picturesque old tower, we were 
accosted by an aged and solemn-visaged personage, 
whose sedate manner disposed us to temporary 
belief, and who had much to tell about Byron and 
his family. He gravely assured us that Bryon's 
daughter. Lady Lovelace, had a club-foot precisely 
like her father's, and that the poet sent to Lady 
Byron the poem beginning with the lines, 

" Fare thee well ! and if forever, 
Still forever, fare thee well," 

inclosed in a grocer's bill upon the margin of 
which he had written : ** Please look over this bill 

159 



Literary Rambles 

— I don't think we had so much cheese." This, 
our informant explained, he told upon the authority 
of one who had seen both the papers. Other state- 
ments of his, however, concerning matters of which 
he had personal knowledge, we were subsequently 
able to verify. He had assisted in preparing the 
vault for the reception of the body of Byron, and 
was the last person to enter it before the coffin was 
deposited there. The vault then contained many 
detached skulls and bones of ancient Byrons, and, 
along one side of it, fifteen or more lead coffins were 
piled upon each other until the lowermost were flat- 
tened and bent out of shape by the weight of those 
above. They had been corded up in this manner 
to clear a space so that the poet and his mother 
could be placed side by side. This old man had 
also witnessed the approach of Byron's fiineral 
train from Nottingham. It consisted of eleven 
carriages, the only one of them belonging to the 
local gentry being that of Colonel Wildman, the 
then owner of Newstead, who had been the poet's 
form-fellow at Harrow-on-the-Hill. 

The octogenarian remembered that the little 
church was not filled at Byron's fimeral. Few of 
the best families of the vicinage were represented, 
and, besides the poet's intimate friend Lord Hob- 
house, his solicitor Hanson, the devoted Fletcher, 
and the servant Tita, who had attended the body 

1 60 



Byron's Funeral and Tomb 

from Greece, the assemblage was mostly composed 
of the hired attendants and of the idle and curious 
persons of the lower class of the town who were 
attracted by the spectacle. It was afterward a 
matter of local comment that the officiating clergy- 
man read the burial service in a perfunctory man- 
ner, and this was explained by the supposition that 
he **felt himself disgraced by having to bury an 
atheist." 

Entrance to the church is through a picturesque 
porch of ponderous timbers, beneath which is an 
arched doorway and a heavy studded oaken door 
with massive locks. We are permitted to enter 
alone. Traversing the aisle, we approach the chan- 
cel and stand with bared heads above the ashes of 
Byron. A slab of colored marble, sent by 
the King of his beloved Greece, — the land whose 
praises he chanted and for whose liberty he gave 
his Hfe, — is set in the floor within the chancel, just 
at the top of the second step, to mark the spot be- 
neath which he is laid. The stone is inlaid with 
a circlet of brass laurel leaves which inclose the 
word Byron. As we stand above the spot, the 
rich light from one of the Gothic stained windows 
streams in upon the name and seems to glorify it. 

There can be no doubt that the poet once ex- 
pected to be buried beside the dog Boatswain in 
the old Abbey garden at Newstead. His will, 
K i6i 



Literary Rambles 

made in 1 8 1 1 , contained explicit directions to 
that end, and in the course of some repairs made 
some years ago to the foundations of the dog's 
monument, it was discovered that Byron had made 
careflil preparation for his own entombment there 
— even the stone slab and trestles, upon which his 
body was to He, between his dog and his valet, 
were found in place within a spacious vault of 
dressed stone. But the sale of Newstead in 1 8 1 8 
terminated this plan. In a minor poem, written 
prior to the misanthropic determination to be 
buried with his dog, Byron plaintively breathes the 
wish that his dust may at last mingle with that of 
his mother ; accordingly, after the authorities of 
Westminster had refused him sepulture, this humble 
temple and the ancient tomb of his family received 
him, and here, after the stress of his fevered life, he 
sleeps 

"The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead." 

About him repose the moldering remains of 
many generations of his line, and it is believed that 
there is an older vault beneath in which still more 
ancient Byrons are entombed. Ponderous flag- 
stones have long closed the entrance to the poet's 
vault, but the sacristan had been within it to assist 
at the entombment of Ada Byron, and found it to 
be of considerable size. In the center Byron's 

162 



Ada Byron's Interment 

coffin, covered with plain black velvet, rests upon 
a bench of stone three feet in height, and on the 
floor at his feet is a frail receptacle holding his 
heart and brain, which were removed at the au- 
topsy. 

After Byron's interment it was rumored that the 
heart was not here, that the Greeks had retained 
it, and bore the casket containing the precious relic 
into their battles as the Jews carried the Ark. A 
narrative of one of their revolutionary conflicts avers 
that, in their hurried retreat before the victorious 
Turks, they lost the casket in a fen. The coffin 
of his mother lies upon the right of the poet, on a 
spot which he selected and prepared, and that of 
his daughter Ada is upon his left. From her death- 
bed she wrote to Colonel Wildman to entreat that her 
body might be removed to Newstead, and thence 
taken to be deposited beside that of her illustrious 
parent. Accordingly, her remains lay for several 
days, covered with a pall of purple velvet, in the 
princely drawing-room of the Abbey — the room 
which had sometime been the refectory of the 
monks, and the hay-loft of the poet's predecessor, 
**the wicked Lord Byron." Ada's widowed 
husband, who for forty-two years survived her, 
was but a few years ago laid in his own family 
burial-place in Kent. 

Not far from the poet sleeps his faithful valet, 
163 



Literary Rambles 

Joe Murray, who was to have been buried with 
Byron and the dog, and who, after his master's in- 
terment in the church, dechned to be sepulchered 
"alone with the dog" in the vault beneath Boat- 
swain' s monument ; two or three rods away is the 
moldering turf-heap which marks the resting-place 
of the mysterious ** Little White Lady ' ' of Irving' s 
touching narrative, whose insane admiration for 
Byron induced her in life to haunt the scenes amid 
which he had lived, and to desire in death to be 
placed near the idol of her imagination. 

Upon the chancel wall is a tablet of dove- 
colored marble which bears the inscription : 

** In the vault beneath, 

Where many of his Ancestors and his Mother 

are buried, 

lie the remains of 

GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON, 

Lord Byron of Rochdale, 

The author of ' Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' 

He was born in London, on the 

22 of January, 1788, 

He died at Missolonghi, in Western Greece, 

on the 19 of April, 1824, 
Engaged in the glorious attempt to restore that 
Country to her ancient freedom and renown." 

This tablet was erected by his half-sister Augusta, 
wife of Colonel Leigh, to whom some of the poet's 
tenderest stanzas were addressed, and who was the 

164 



Byron Monuments and Relics 

subject of the cruel but ephemeral *' Byron Scan- 
dal" of an American authoress. The stone is 
simple and cheap compared with some monuments 
set in these walls to commemorate thrifty villagers 
unheard of outside the parish. By Byron's tablet 
we once saw a chaplet of faded laurel, lovingly 
placed by our *< Bard of the Sierras," Joaquin Miller, 
and a wreath said to have been sent by Byron's 
granddaughter. Lady Anne Blunt, author of some 
charming books of travel and wife of the daring 
explorer Wilfred S. Blunt, whose book of '* Son- 
nets" was largely written while he was suffering 
imprisonment for his zealous espousal of the cause 
of Home Rule for Ireland. Here, too, was pre- 
served a piece of embroidery representing the Byron 
coat of arms, which lay upon the poet's coffin at 
the flineral. For years it hung loosely tacked on 
the wall, and Curtis Jackson, a rector sometime 
incumbent here, caused its removal and, as he sup- 
posed, its destruction. We owe its preservation to 
the broader sympathies of the sexton who concealed 
it in his cottage near the churchyard. The sable 
hangings which draped the pulpit at Byron's funeral 
are said to have been torn down and stolen a few 
days after the ceremony. 

Byron's Ada, "sole daughter of his house and 
heart," is commemorated by a smaller tablet set 
in the wall near his own and surmounted by an 

165 



Literary Rambles 

armorial device. The inscription shows that she 
and her father died at the same early age of thirty- 
six. 

Page 54 of the dilapidated old parish register 
contains the record of the poet's burial ; 

^'Name, George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron ; 
Abode, Died at Missolonghi in Western Greece, Apr. 19, 
1824 ; 

Buried, 16th of July ; 

■Age, Thirty-six j 

Ceremony performed by Rev. Charles Nixon." 

Another page records that Ada died November 1 7, 
1852, at No. 69 Cumberland Place, London, 
and w^as interred here December 3, the burial 
service being conducted by the bigot who ordered 
the destruction of the armorial memento of her 
father. A worn parchment copy of the inscription 
upon the coffin of the poet's mother, **The 
Honorable Catherine Gordon Byron," has been 
preserved here. It recites that she was a "lineal 
descendant of the Earl of Huntley and Lady Jean 
Stuart, daughter of King James the First, of Scot- 
land . Died in the forty-sixth year of her age, August 
first, 1 81 1." 

For centuries this was the chapel of the Byrons 
and the site of their ancient square pew is yet 
pointed out. The oldest memorial we observed 

166 



Visitors — Ada — Augusta — Guiccioli 

upon the walls is that of *«Sir John Byron the 
Little, with the great Beard," whose portrait we 
had seen at the Abbey. 

The tomb of Byron is not, Hke Shakspere's, a 
popular place of pilgrimage. Visitors to this shrine 
have ever been few, and even his own family and 
personal friends strangely neglected it. The cousin 
who inherited Byron's title ** never saw or sought 
his grave ' ' ; the daughter of his house and heart and 
the adored sister who enjoyed his fortune came but 
once ; his wife, the mother of his child, came not 
at all. 

Not many years ago the visits of his sister and 
daughter were yet remembered by a few residents 
of the neighborhood. Mrs. Leigh was described 
as having Httle pretension to personal beauty ; but 
her face, saddened by the misconduct of a son, 
habitually wore an expression of gentleness and 
amiability which more than atoned for its plainness. 
Ada Byron's visit was made but a year or two 
before her own death ; she passed a few days with 
Colonel Wildman at the Abbey, and was remem- 
bered by those who saw her here as bearing little 
resemblance in feature to her father. She was said 
to have been habitually abstracted and often gloomy 
in manner, was rather unattractive of face and so care- 
less of her dress and personal adornment that it was 
remarked that her maid seemed more ''genteelly" 

167 



Literary Rambles 

attired than herself. The sexton once told an 
American tourist that Ada seemed distrait when she 
visited her father's tomb ; she deported herself 
most strangely, glanced for a moment at the pave- 
ment above the vault, inquired ''which way his 
head lay," and then hurried away without another 
word. 

Very diiFerent was the demeanor of another 
visitor who, years afterward, came to this place : 
she was an elderly lady of distinguished appearance 
and great personal charm, who spoke with a foreign 
accent and was afterward ascertained to be the 
Guiccioli, Byron's famous Italian enchantress. She 
came with liveried servants and splendid equipage, 
and begged to be left alone in the church. The 
sexton, reentering an hour later, found her greatly 
agitated and disheveled, kneeling with streaming 
eyes upon the stones which cover the dust of the 
lover for whom she had gladly sacrificed her repu- 
tation forty years before. At the time of her 
visit she was the widow of De Boissy, and was 
engaged upon her ** Recollections " of Byron, 
the book which was the provoking cause of the 
publication of Mrs. Stowe's "True Story of Lady 
Byron's Life." 

As we stand at the poet's tomb we reflect that 
the gifted being, whose ashes are under our feet, 
sacrificed his life in an heroic endeavor to further 

i68 



Byron Worthy of Westminster 

a righteous cause, and that when he broke away 
from all his insincere course to devote himself to 
the redemption of Greece, Lady Byron believed 
she saw an answer to her prayers, and that **the 
angel in him" at last stood revealed. Was he 
unworthy of sepulture in Westminster ? Then 
he was equally unfit for burial here. This sacred 
fane had no kingly monuments, no gilded chapels, 
no architectural splendors, no imposing displays 
of princely or priestly pageantry ; it was of the 
smallest and simplest, its walls were plain and 
somber, but it was as holy as Westminster, and it 
should have been held as sacred against the ** profa- 
nation." 

We are content to find Byron entombed with 
his kindred, beside the few he truly loved, amid 
the scenes he once inhabited, and to believe that 
in long years to come an increasing number of the 
myriads his poetry enriches and delights will fare 
to this place as to a shrine, and that the fame of 
him who reposes here will endure when the many 
base and sordid whose memorials encumber the 
walls of England's national mausoleum have sunk 
into merited and merciful oblivion. 



169 



THE AYRSHIRE BURNSLAND 



Shrines by the Way — Old Ayr — Tarn o" Shanter Inn — 
Alloivay Cottage — Relics — Haunted Kirk — Brig 
o' Doon — Mount Oliphant — Lochlea — Tarbolton — 
Homes of Bonnie Jean and Mary Morison — Poosie 
Nansie^ s — Hamilton'' s — Churchyard of Holy Fair — 
Mossgiel — Scenes of Poems — Shanter Farm. 

T7^ A RLIER jaunts have been through the Niths- 
■^■^ dale haunts of the ploughman-bard, or have 
led us to scenes of the brief life of his ** Highland 
Mary," and left us at her grave by the busy Clyde, l 
Strolling southward now from Glasgow, birth- 
place of Campbell and burial-place of Motherwell 
and Edward Irving, we linger in places where 
poor Tannahill toiled and sang, we seek the village 
where was born the hero of Jane Porter's romance, 
and reach, a way beyond, the crescentic sweep of 
shining beach which borders Ayrshire's seaward 
side. Here is Irvine, where the poet Montgomery 
was born, and where Burns, the song laureate of 
the world, early essayed to establish a business in 
flax, a venture abruptly terminated by a fire that 
destroyed the shop during a New Year carousal and 
left him *' like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." 
Following the curving coast, with the peaks of 
Arran in view across the mountain-bound Firth on 

1 See " A Literary Pilgrimage." 
170 



I 



Ayr — Tarn o' Shanter Inn 

our right and the rock of Ailsa rising out of the sea 
before us, we come to Ayr, the capital town of 
that bonnie region that has been forever conse- 
crated by the Hfe and genius of Burns. The bard 
knew well this *' ancient brugh." In passionate 
life he often walked these olden thoroughfares, his 
eyes often beheld the quaint gray-gabled houses yet 
standing in some of the streets. In Ayr he lived 
and studied for a httle time with Murdoch; here he 
attended the same market, at the end of the "Auld 
Brig," to which his own Tam o' Shanter re- 
paired, and he doubtless often drank in the same 
dingy tavern on the high street. The ''Brigs o£ 
Ayr" still arch the river; the ** drowsy Dungeon 
clock ' ' of the poem numbers the hours in a modern 
Wallace Tower hard by, and not far away in the 
same street we find the inn where Tam and Souter 
Johnny *'got fou' thegither." It is a plain little 
two-storied fabric with plastered walls and sanded 
floors; in a dusky low-studded upper room, reached 
by a narrow stairway, we see the large fireplace 
before which Tam and his drouthy crony sat 
"bousing at the nappy" on one eventfiil night, 
and here we were once privileged to sip our ale 
from the self-same *'caup" — a hardwood mug 
encircled with silver — which Tam too often 
drained. Ayr' s old churchyard holds the molder- 
ing tomb of Robert Aiken, the ** honor' d, much 

171 



Literary Rambles 

respected friend ' ' to whom Burns inscribed his 
** Cotter's Saturday Night," and near by sleep the 
doctors McGill and Dalrymple, who are celebrated 
in **The Kirk's Alarm." Carmichael Smith, the 
Colonel Newcome of Thackeray's tale, is buried in 
the Episcopal church, and a memorial brass is there 
erected by Thackeray's daughter, inscribed with a 
quotation from *'The Newcomes." 

Our road to Alloway is the one along which 
Tam o' Shanter made his memorable ride 
*'thro' dub and mire." It lies between low 
walls or fragrant hedgerows, shaded here and there 
by overhanging trees ; in places it has been straight- 
ened since Tam's 'time, but we may still see 
his ''meikle stane" and the ford 

*' Where In the snaw the chapman smoor'd," 

and a short distance beyond we reach the rude 
roadside cottage in which was born to lowly life 
one who has enriched the world with his marvel- 
ous song. This thatched, clay-built hut, the 
fancied scene of ''The Cotter's Saturday Night," 
was constructed by the hands of Burns' s father, 
the *' toil-worn cotter" of the poem, and so un- 
skilfully that part of a gable fell one tempestuous 
winter night, ten days after ''Love's sweetest 
bard was born," and mother and babe were car- 
ried for shelter to the cottage on the opposite side 

172 



Alloway — Burns's Birthplace 

of the street, where Murdoch subsequently taught 
the school which Burns and his brother attended. 

Newer apartments have been added to the 
birthplace, and the two original rooms have more 
windows than Burns knew, but this rude stone 
floor is the same his infant feet pressed, the recess 
in that side wall holds the narrow bed in which 
he was born, through yonder tiny window first 
fell for him the light of heaven, beside the wide 
fireplace in (this nearer wall he played as a child, 
and around it, in the maturity of his imagination, 
he grouped the ** priest-like father " and the homely 
family circle in one of the most exquisitely im- 
pressive scenes that poetry ever portrayed. 

Among the authenticated relics here preserved 
are the Afton manuscript book with sixty-eight 
pages of Burns's handwriting, including the draft of 
''Tamo' Shanter," his Edinburgh commonplace 
book, manuscripts of the songs *'Lord Gregory" 
and " Craigieburn Wood," a leaf from his excise 
'book, a lease containing the signature of the ''priest- 
like father" and conveying to him the field in 
which he built this cottage. Here also we see the 
table and candlesticks fi-om the poor home in which 
Burns died, the toddy-ladle and wooden plate used 
by him at Nanse Tinnock's, the chairs in which 
Tam o' Shanter and the souter sat to drink in 
the tavern at Ayr, and a chair made from the ma- 

173 



Literary Rambles 

terials of the press on which the first edition of 
Burns' s poems was printed. These precious 
mementos are reverently gazed upon by thousands 
of pilgrims, who bring to the lowly cottage from 
every quarter of the world their tribute of love and 
tears. 

The cottage is held by a board of trustees, and 
is in charge of a courteous custodian who fills the 
place of one of the heroes of Tennyson's *< Charge 
of the Light Brigade," whom we found here years 
ago. A dwelling for the caretaker has recently 
been erected at some distance, and the removal of 
the modern structures which adjoin the cottage is 
projected in order to isolate that precious tenement 
and to restore it as nearly as possible to the condi- 
tion in which it was when it sheltered the germ of 
the brightest genius of his time. 

The crumbling walls of * * Alloway ' s auld haunted 
kirk ' ' are just beyond the birthplace. By the en- 
trance to the churchyard is the grave of Burns' s 
father, whose epitaph was written by the bard, and 
of his youngest sister, and a few steps back of this 
rises the roofless ruin, with its gray, weather-worn 
walls, its steep gables, and quaint little belfry. The 
kirk is disappointingly small, — Hawthorne once 
measured it and found it not more than seventeen 
of his paces in length and ten in width, — but, 
small as it is, the genius of the lad who lived within 

174 



Haunted Kirk — Doon Bridge 

sound of its bell has rendered it more famous than 
the grandest temple on the globe. The window 
through which Tam watched the gambols of 
''Cutty-sark" and the rest has been filled up, but 
we may yet see the ** winnock-bunker" where sat 
**auld Nick in shape of beast" to pipe for the 
the dancers. Many graves crowd the old church- 
yard, and some are even obtruded into the ivied 
interior of the ruin and strew the sward where 
aforetime the witches danced. 

The half-furlong of now disused road, over 
which Meg and Nannie made the race so full of 
peril for poor Tam, brings us to the ancient, ivy- 
grown bridge of Doon. For four centuries its 
vaulting graystone arch, as hght and gracefiil of 
eifect as a cloud-wreath, has spanned the storied 
stream. From the **key-stane," where Meg lost 
her tail, we see a reach of the river upbearing upon 
its bosom trailing boughs, murmuring its content 
beneath arching trees ; and, upon either side, the 
*'bonnie banks and braes" the poet sang, clothed 
now in verdure of leaf and blade and gemmed with 
summer flowers that bloom as fair as when Burns 
wandered here, a barefoot boy, and **pu'd the gow- 
ans fine." 

The costly and incongruous monument which 
rises fi-om the banks of Doon might well be passed 
in silence did not the chamber in its pedestal con- 

175 



Literary Rambles 

tain objects which must stir the heart of every pil- 
grim in Burnsland. Here is the ring with which 
Burns wed his ** Bonnie Jean," removed from her 
finger fifty years afterward when she was dressed for 
her cofiin, and other rings containing hair from the 
poet' s dark locks ; here are the cheap, poorly printed 
volumes of the Bible which he gave to ** Highland 
Mary " at their betrothal, with a tress of her shining 
hair attached to one, and with a text designed to 
emphasize their vows written by his hand in each 
volume and signed, ** Robert Burns, Mossgiel" ; 
here are wine-glasses presented by his **Clarinda," 
and other objects of minor interest. The eminence 
of the monument overlooks a landscape of surpass- 
ing beauty pervaded by the spirit and memory of 
Burns: at our feet glides his ** Bonnie Doon" ; 
hard by we see the cottage of his birth, the graves 
of his kindred, the haunts of his boyhood, the 
scenes of much of his best and sweetest verse ; out- 
spread before us is a sweep of verdant hills and 
meadowy holms, of deep woodlands and orchards, 
and the upland fields where his young hands toiled 
to help his father to pay the rent. 

A mile or so farther we find, above the braes of 
Doon, the farm of Mount Oliphant, to which the 
Burns family removed fi-om Alloway when the 
future bard was seven years old. Here he passed 
ten years of Hfe, some of them hard and monoto- 

176 



Burns Relics — Mount Oliphant 

nous, uniting *'the cheerless gloom of a hermit 
and the unceasing toil of a galley-slave ' * ; and here, 
also, he began to exercise that divine gift of song 
which was destined, despite the pathetic limitations 
of his condition and the faults o£ his life, to bend 
all hearts to his sway. 

The poor farmsteading of Burns' s time has been 
replaced by the present more attractive buildings, 
and of the quondam whitewashed tenement hardly 
a vestige remains ; a few great trees that he knew 
cast their shade upon the newer dwelling, and an 
old hedge which borders the yard is said to be a 
survivor of his day. About the house we see bleak 
fields he once tilled, where first he *'held a yoking 
at the plough," and where among the golden 
harvest grain he found his first sweetheart, whom 
he celebrated in his ** Handsome Nell," for his 
earliest as well as his latest poem was inspired by a 
lass. As we walk across the fields where he made 
love to the blacksmith's bewitching daughter we 
have in view an entrancing prospect which often 
blessed the vision of the bard : the course of the 
Doon through dark woodlands and open glades ; a 
pastoral of green fields, copses, and gardens ; the 
spires of «'Auld Ayr" on the shore; the misty 
heights of far Arran and a great expanse of shim- 
mering sea. 

Lochlea farm, which became the home of the 
L 177 



Literary Rambles 

family when driven from Mount Oliphant by the 
rapacity of the pitiless factor whose character Burns 
depicted in the **Tale of Twa Dogs," is reached 
by a longer jaunt. It is an undulating tract of 
above a hundred acres, manifestly more fertile now 
than in the days when the elder Burns was here 
weighed to earth by work and worry in a struggle 
which ended only with his death. Once we saw 
here a hntel and some fragments from the barn that 
Burns used, but no part of the cluster of old build- 
ings is now standing. From the door of the pres- 
ent dwelhng we see men ploughing and cattle feed- 
ing in the fields hallowed by the toil of the bard, 
where the spirit of poetry attended him in the cart 
or walked with him behind the plough. Not far 
from the end of the house is a large tree beneath 
which, as Burns' s niece told this writer, the poet, 
reclining after a noon-day meal, penned the song 
'*Now; Westhn Winds" to Peggy Thomson, the 
second of his long procession of poetic heroines ; in 
the rye-grass field adjoining the house occurred the 
misadventure of his pet ewe upon which he founded 
the poem of "Poor Maillie," composed while he 
ploughed in the next field. At Lochlea, too, he 
wrote **John Barleycorn," the dirge on ** Winter," 
and the song **On Cessnock Banks." The last 
celebrated the charms of Ellison Begbie, a servant 
in a family of the neighborhood, whom Burns 

178 



Lochlea — Tarbolton Masonic Lodge 

vainly wooed, and to whom the first four of his 
published letters were addressed. 

By the road, Tarbolton would be two or three 
miles distant from Lochlea, but we find a shorter 
way through the fields — a way doubtless often traced 
by Robin on his nightly walks to the village to 
attend the dancing- school, the Masonic lodge, or 
the Bachelors' Club, or to make love to sundry of 
**The Lasses of Tarbolton," whom he lauded in 
his songs. The village is unattractive : among the 
houses which closely fine the narrow, curving streets 
are a few of modern construction, but more are 
low and dingy old fabrics of stone or stucco, with 
an air suggestive of uncleanhness. 

One little, low-eaved old edifice, with grim 
walls of stone and sloping roof of thatch, standing 
at a corner of the street, once housed the Masonic 
lodge into which Burns was introduced by the 
John Rankine to whom three of his poems were 
addressed ; in this poor place the poet was a regu- 
lar attendant at the meetings of the fraternity, here 
he oft ** presided o'er the sons of light," and the 
chair in which he sat and articles of regalia used by 
him are carefiilly preserved in the present more 
sumptuous quarters of the lodge. In this old hut 
Burns read to his fellow-craftsmen ** The Farewell," 
written when he was about to emigrate to Jamaica, 
and it was some ostentatious aff'ectation of medical 

179 



Literary Rambles 

knowledge displayed by the village pedagogue 
(John Wilson) in a meeting here that inspired the 
grotesque ** Death and Doctor Hornbook," which 
the bard meditated as he walked home from the 
lodge. 

Wilson's house, opposite the parish church, has 
long since disappeared ; the scene of the bard's 
encounter with Death, as described in the poetic 
lampoon, is still found a little way beyond the vil- 
lage, where some rocks by the roadside are shown 
as the place where the pair rested, while Death be- 
wailed the ready art of his rival Doctor Horn- 
book. Hard by, on the same descending piece 
of road, is the *« Willie's mill" of the poem, — 
sometime occupied by Burns' s friend William 
Muir, — a long, rambling structure, of various 
heights and dimensions, standing near a water whose 
power is now superseded by steam in driving the 
mill's machinery. 

By the sylvan banks ot the Faile we come to 
Coilsfield, 1 where Burns knew and loved ** High- 
land Mary," and eastward a pleasant jaunt leads 
us to the village of Mauchline, which abounds with 
memories of the most fruitful period of Burns' s life. 
In the Cowgate we find the place of the poor 
thatched abode of the stonemason James Armour, 
in which was born and reared the dark-eyed 
1 Described in *' A Literary Pilgrimage." 

i8o 



Mauchline — Bonnie Jean 

daughter who became Burns* s wife, and who, as 
** Bonnie Jean,'* is immortalized in several of his 
sweetest songs, and the site of the grass-plat where 
the acquaintance between the poet and the winsome 
lass began with some sportive banter anent his dog, 
which had run across the linen she was spreading 
to bleach. A brick tenement now replaces the 
ancient tavern ot John' Dove, — the ** Johnnie 
Pidgeon" of Burns' s *' Epitaph " and the "John 
Dow" of his ** Epistle to John Kennedy," — to 
which the poet often resorted during his residence 
at Mossgiel, for he ** loved a glass almost as well 
as a lass ' ' ; but upon a near corner is Poosie 
Nansie's alehouse, where Burns beheld the splore of 
<'The J0II7 Beggars" that suggested to him the 
famous cantata which Allan Cunningham deemed 
the greatest of its kind in the language. The house 
is a two-storied stone structure with steep roofs, a 
chimney rises above either sharp gable, and the end 
facing the street corner bears a legend which sets 
forth the pretensions of this old howff. Within its 
walls this writer once found a modern '* Jolly 
Beggars' Club" — a branch of the Burns Federation 
— in session, and, lounging about the place, a poor 
and seedy grandnephew of ** Bonnie Jean," who, 
among other unsuccessful ventures, had tried the 
healing art in America. He appeared half ashamed 
of his relationship to Burns' s heroine, but the pros- 

181 



Literary Rambles 

pect of a fee induced him to pilot us to the places 
which had been associated with her life in the 
village. 

One of these was the cheerless low-studded 
chamber, with its poor bed set in the wall, on the 
upper floor of a dismal stone tenement opposite 
Nanse Tinnock' s, in which Jean began her check- 
ered married life with Burns, through all of which, 
as she has testified, he **lo'ed her well and never 
said a misbehadden word to her in a' his days." 

The residence of Gavin Hamilton, Burns' s land- 
lord and attached fi-iend, was the ivy-shaded edifice 
of tooled stone standing near the churchyard and 
adjoining the ancient abbey ruin. Some time ago 
we saw the gloomy rooms inhabited by the widow 
of Hamilton's son, — the wee lad mentioned in 
Burns's ''Dedication," — who showed us the bare 
apartment where Hamilton married the poet to 
Jean, and where Burns, to win a wager, wrote 
the stinging satire of **The Calf" within a half- 
hour after he had heard a sermon by one James 
Steven from the text in Malachi, iv, 2. In this 
house * * Highland Mary ' ' was for a time a domes- 
tic, and here Burns's mother saw and loved her. 
Burns was here a frequent guest, welcomed by 
Hamilton, whose friendship was one of the most 
important circumstances of the poet's life. Ham- 
ilton — celebrated by Burns in the ''Epitaph," 

182 



Gavin Hamilton's — Nanse Tinnock's 

the ** Dedication," and the rhyming ** Epistle" — 
was being persecuted by the kirk for non-observance 
of some of its ordinances, and it was the poet's 
sympathy for his friend that partly prompted the 
poignant lampoons, like ** Holy Willie's Prayer," 
**The Twa Herds," and **The Holy Fair," 
which Burns produced at that time, and which he 
read aloud to Hamilton in this old office-room 
where we have been sitting. 

By the top of one street stands another object of 
pilgrimage : it is the grim two-storied, hip-roofed 
old house at the corner, standing close upon the 
sidewalk, to which low steps descend from the 
humble doorway. Its surroundings are sordid, its 
rooms are few and mean, yet we visit it more than 
once, for it was the home of the ** lovely Mary 
Morison" whom Burns sang in what Hazlitt be- 
lieved to be the best of his love-songs, ''O Mary, 
at Thy Window Be." Mary's window still com- 
mands the stretch of village street by which her 
poet-lover would approach. 

'*Auld Nanse Tinnock's" hostelry, which 
Burns mentioned in ** The Earnest Cry and 
Prayer," and where he sometimes ** studied politics 
over a glass of guid Scotch drink," is at the border 
of the churchyard on the way along which he 
would come from Mossgiel. It is a dingy-looking, 
weather-beaten building of ancient masonry, whose 

183 



Literary Rambles 

rooms can never have been bright and lightsome 
w^ith the many gravestones looking in through the 
dusty casements. A back door opening into the 
churchyard in Burns' s day served the convenience 
of the w^orshipers, w^ho, as described in **The 
Holy Fair," flocked into this change-house to re- 
gale themselves w^ith cakes and ale in the interval 
betw^een the Sunday services. 

A more sightly church has replaced the ungainly 
edifice in which Burns listened to weekly exposi- 
tions of the fierce and bigoted Presbyterianism which 
in that place and time represented Christianity, 
from the lips of the ** Daddy Auld" of his 
** Kirk's Alarm," and where he stood in his seat 
to be publicly rebuked by that preacher for his 
misdoing with Jean. The old churchyard is the 
scene of the witty «*Holy Fair." Among the 
dead who fill it now are some whose memories 
have been made famous or infamous by the muse 
of Burns. Just at the end of the church sleep the 
family of Miss Wilhelmina Alexander, the lady to 
whom he addressed that beautifial lyric, ** The 
Lass o' Ballochmyle. " An obscure corner holds 
the grave of * * Daddy Auld, ' ' and, not far away, 
a slab, from which the inscription has crumbled, 
marks the resting-place of the pharisaical elder 
William Fisher, whom, as **Holy Willie," Burns 
excoriated in his most pitiless satire. Here, too, in 

184 



Scene of "The Holy Fair" — Mossgiel 

the grave with her father, Hes the poet' s Mary Mor- 
ison, beneath a quaint old headstone whose inscrip- 
tion shows that she died at the early age of twenty, 
four years after he had so sweetly sung her praises. 
A simple railing of iron incloses the burial-place of 
the Armours — **Bonnie Jean's" family. With 
them molder the ashes of Burns' s infant children ; 
Nanse Tinnock and ''racer Jess " of** The Holy 
Fair ' ' are buried near, and Gavin Hamilton sleeps 
in a grave which is unmarked by any memorial that 
might have borne the ** Epitaph" written by his 
friend. 

By a short stroll northward along the highway in 
which Burns met his inspirer. Fun, on the morn- 
ing of the ** Holy Fair," we approach Mossgiel, 
the abode of the bard during some of his most 
eventflil and poetically productive years. The 
farm lies upon an elevation which overlooks an 
extent of beautiflil country bounded by distant 
green hills. The dwelling, which stands well 
back fi-om the highway, is a more comfortable and 
commodious successor to the poor **but an' ben " 
which Burns inhabited. A few years since we 
met in the vicinage the man who, three decades 
before, rebuilt the cottage, and who pointed out 
portions of the old walls that were retained, and in- 
dicated that the shape and extent of the original 
rooms remained the same, and that the location of 

185 



Literary Rambles 

their windows was unchanged. Other rooms are 
now joined to these, and Burns' s garret — so low 
that he could not stand upright beneath the sloping 
thatch, lighted only by four gloomy little panes, 
and reached by a trap-door from the **ben'' 
below ^ — is succeeded by a comfortable chamber 
beneath a roof of slate. In that wretched attic 
Burns slept, sharing his couch with his brother 
Gilbert or the ploughboy John Blane, and there, 
upon a little deal table under the window, he 
penned immortal poems that are read and known of 
all the world. We will the better appreciate the 
force and character of Burns' s genius if we realize 
something of this depressing environment and of the 
squalid hindrances amid which that genius was 
developed and out of which it broke forth like a 
newly risen sun. 

Reminders of the bard are here : the tall hedge 
of hawthorn that screens the cottage was partly 
planted by his hands; the wide-spreading trees 
that tower above the roofs shade his accustomed 
resting-place in fervent noon-day hours; it was 
while weeding in the garden inclosure that he com- 
pleted and recited to Gilbert the wonderful * 'Epis- 
tle to Davie"; in this field behind the house he 
ploughed up the nest of the *' wee, sleekit, cow'rin, 
tim'rous" mouse, and composed the poem which 
that event called forth ; in the next field his plough 

i86 



Mossgiel Scenes and Reminiscences 

turned under ** The Mountain Daisy" of his 
verse; on yonder sightly ridge he wallced with his 
brother while he first rehearsed his masterpiece, 
<*The Cotter's Saturday Night"; every rod ot 
these broad acres has felt the pressure of his foot as 
he followed his plough or reaped his scanty sheaves, 
gathering meanwhile more opulent harvests of song; 
in every direction are views whose spirit is reflected 
in his tender Hues, objects which supphed the reflec- 
tive imagery of his lyrics, beloved scenes of his labor 
or leisure, where we linger with a thrilling sense of 
nearness to him. 

At Mossgiel were written, besides the poems 
already mentioned, ** Halloween," "Jolly Beg- 
gars," '< Man Was Made to Mourn," "Winter 
Night," "TwaDogs," "Address to the Deil," 
the metrical satires,— most of the numbers of his 
first pubHshed edition which made the whole coun- 
tryside resound with his praises. 

To the Mossgiel period of Burns' s life belongs 
the touching and romantic episode of his association 
with *' Highland Mary," and it was here that tid- 
ings came to him of her untimely death, the event 
which evoked the exquisite poem ** To Mary in 
Heaven. ' ' Here he knew the concentrated bitter- 
ness of iU-requited drudgery, poverty, and shame, 
and here he tasted the joys of praise and of instant 
and unexampled renown : from Mossgiel he set 

187 



Literary Rambles 

forth on his journey to Edinburgh, poor and threat- 
ened with disgraceful expatriation ; to Mossgiel 
he returned a few months later, relatively rich and 
the most esteemed of all his countrymen. Inter- 
woven with the lights and shades of his life here 
was his lasting love for Jean, and it was with her 
that he left this place for the lovely Nithsdale, 
where, after a brief period of happiness, the clouds 
closed over him, never again to be dispelled, but to 
settle in sable gloom above his sepulcher. 

Twelve miles southward, along the shore from 
Ayr, we come to Kirkoswald, the place of the 
school where Burns spent his seventeenth summer, 
and of the cottage next door where lived Peggy 
Thomson, the inspirer of **Now Westlin Winds," 
whose charms ** overset his trigonometry and set 
him off at a tangent from the sphere of his studies.'* 
In the ancient parish churchyard is the grave of 
**Tam o' Shanter, " and nearer the coast is the 
Shanter farm where, according to local tradition, 
the boy Burns — then sojourning with his uncle in 
this parish — took refuge one night when a storm 
had driven him and his companions from their 
fishing on the bay. The goodman (Graeme or 
Graham) was absent at Ayr market when the 
storm arose, and had not returned at midnight 
when the fishermen left his dame (Helen) sulkily 
waiting for him and predicting that his late home- 

i88 



Kirkoswald — The Shanter Farm 

comings would end in his being drowned in the 
Doon or captured by warlocks at Alloway's kirk. 

This Carrick shore was the birthplace of Burns' s 
mother ; just beyond yonder eastern hills Allan 
Ramsay and the Admirable Crichton were born ; 
and southward lies ancient Galloway, where — 
"but," as Kipling would say, "that is another 
story." 



189 



THE ENGLISH LAKELAND 
AND ITS MANY WRITERS 



yane Eyre — Robert Ehmere — Wthoti' & Elleray — Hemans — 
Harriet Martineau — Arnold — Rydal Mount — Nab Cot- 
tage — Do've Cottage — Word$ivorth and De ^uincey — 
Scenes oj"^' Opium-Eater^^ — Grasmere Church and Church- 
yard — Hel'vellyn — Wordsiuorth' s Birthplace and School 
— Ruskin^ s Brantivood — Scenes of Hall Caine^s Fiction- 
Shelley'' s Cottage — Home of Coleridge and Southey. 

f^\ UR tour of the enchanting Lakeland has been 
^-^ designedly delayed so that it might at once 
complete and conclude one summer's literary ram- 
bles in Britain. From the rocks of Craigenputtock, 
where Carlyle and Emerson «*sat and talked of the 
immortality of the soul ' ' ; from Pennine heights, 
which overlook Scott's **Rokeby," the haunts of 
Eugene Aram, of the sentimental Sterne, and of the 
gifted sisters Bronte ; from craggy Welsh headlands ; 
from the railways by which we have fared to and 
from the land oi Burns, we have had alluring pros- 
pects of the green mountain walls of this delectable 
region which has been the abode of so many be- 
loved authors. 

It is a small district to hold so large a place in 
the world of letters, but its diminutive area contains 
every element and variety of perfect scenery, — rug- 
ged mountain mass and peaceful vale, rocky ghyll 

190 



The Lowood of " Jane Eyre " 

and flower-fringed stream, wild tarn and placid 
pool, savage scaur and sunny mead, — and it is to 
this completeness and diversity that the region owes 
its place in song and story. These are the charms 
which have drawn hither the many shining ones 
whose lives and works have contributed to make 
every rod of these landscapes classic ground. 

We are newly come from the Bronte shrines of 
Yorkshire, and we make now a httle detour to reach 
that once popular gateway to Lakeland, Kirby 
Lonsdale, — celebrated by the pencil of Turner and 
the pen of Ruskin, — in whose neighborhood we 
find the place of the Lowood Institution of "Jane 
Eyre." The school building, consisting of an an- 
cient stone-floored structure and of a more modern 
additment which was subsequently converted into a 
factory, stood in a gloomy garden a few rods back 
from a Httle brook at Cowan Bridge, in a situation 
which fully warrants the description given in the 
tale. Of this seminary four of the Brontes were 
inmates. Here EHzabeth and Maria — the latter 
being the prototype of the Helen Burns of **Jane 
Eyre" — contracted mortal maladies, and the sensitive 
Charlotte witnessed and endured the cruelties and 
privations which she portrayed in the story, and 
which clouded her whole life. Casterton Hall, a 
wooded seat not far distant, was the residence of 
Rev. William Carus- Wilson, who managed the 

191 



Literary Rambles 

school during Miss Bronte's pupilage and is pic- 
tured as the despicable Brocklehurst. 

Beyond Kendal, where De Quincey sometime 
edited a newspaper, and where lies the scene of the 
exploit ascribed to Bertram Risingham in '^Rokeby," 
we dally along Kentdale and find ourselves already 
within the borders of Lowell's ** Wordsworth- 
shire," for it was in vain protest against the intrusion 
of the railway into this valley that the great Cum- 
brian bard wrote his sonnet, 

*' Is then no nook of English ground secure," 

which elicited a poetic rejoinder from his friend 
Monckton Milnes. The more remote portion of 
the valley has a newer interest for the literary 
rambler since the author of ** Robert Elsmere " 
wrought its atmosphere, coloring, and customs into 
her fiction. 

We have our first glimpse of Windermere fi*om 
Elleray, long the beloved home of Professor Wilson 
("Christopher North"), whose wondrous diction 
so perfectly sets forth the beauties of lake and 
shore. As we stand upon the swelling knoll near 
Wilson's picturesque cottage, the morning mists, 
which have hung like a pall over the water, are 
lifted, and the wealth of Windermere, with its 
opalescent expanse of water, its fi-aming of foliage, 
its emerald islands, Hes outspread before us. Be- 

192 



Windermere — " Christopher North " 

yond the lake a long line of mist-touched mountains 
greets our vision — the majestic Coniston Old 
Man, the serrated summits of the Langsdale pikes, 
the far ranges of purple fells. This lovely land- 
scape appeals to us as lovers of the muse as well as 
lovers of nature, for it embraces the objects which 
inspired the pens of Wilson and of many another 
bard, and the scenes of Wordsworth's vacation 
sports described in his <* Prelude," — the poem 
which George Eliot found **full of material for a 
daily liturgy." 

EUeray is itself rife with endearing memories. 
To its rambling, rose-covered old cottage, beneath 
the peerless sycamore, the author of the piquant 
*' Noctes Ambrosianae " brought his young wife for 
the «* never- waning honeymoon"; here his children 
were born and his best and happiest years were passed; 
within these shades Scott, Canning, Lockhart, and 
Hogg were guests ; hither the brilliant and bookish 
** Opium Eater," the gifted Hartley Coleridge, and 
Wordsworth came often, and, in the halcyon days, 
lingered long in silvery converse with Wilson, upon 
the spots our feet are to-day privileged to press. 

Strolling northward, we find, upon a wooded 
height at the right of the highway, the commanding 
seat of Briery, where Charlotte Bronte was a guest 
and first met her biographer, Mrs. Gaskell; nearer 
the lake shore is the little sylvan retreat in which 
M 193 



Literary Rambles 

Mrs. Hemans dwelt for a time, where we may see 
the chamber which was her study and the embow- 
ered garden in which she wrote some of her grace- 
ful verse. 

Toward Grasmere every step of our progress has 
its charm. The ways in which we walk have been 
familiarly trodden by authors whom the world will 
long remember; every dale and hill is hallowed by 
some association with their lives ; every feature of 
the landscapes has been celebrated by them in poetry 
or prose that enriches our literature. Ambleside is 
now much more than the ** little rural town'* of 
Wordsworth' s poem ; in its suburbs we find, over- 
looking the Rotha valley from a sunny eminence, 
Harriet Martineau's home. The Knoll. It is a 
charming two-storied, bay-windowed villa, mantled 
with ivy and environed by trees and shrubbery. 
The sward about the door was planted by her. It 
is said that after she had long and vainly tried to 
purchase the turf for this lawn, some cart-loads 
were thrown over her garden wall one night, with a 
note attached to a slab of the sod, which read: **To 
Harriet Martineau — From a lover of her Forest- 
and-Game-Law tales. (Signed) A Poacher." 

The prospect from her home was so beautiful 
that she sometimes said she «* hardly dared to 
withdraw her eyes from it, for fear it should melt." 

194 



Harriet Martineau — Dr. Arnold 

In this chosen site she erected her house; here she 
dwelt for thirty years and wrote once famous 
books ; here she entertained Emerson ; and to her 
here came George EHot and Charlotte Bronte for 
the delightful visits recorded in their letters. Miss 
Martineau is remembered in the neighborhood ra- 
ther for her active philanthropy and her eccentri- 
cities than for her literary productions. We talk 
with some who recall her peculiarities of costume, 
her masculine gait, her deafness (for which she 
sometimes smoked), and the great ear-trumpet she 
habitually carried, and with which she once suc- 
cessfully defended herself against a bull that attacked 
her as she crossed his pasturage. 

In a green recess just across the valley is Fox 
How, sometime the abode of Dr. Arnold, the 
great head master of *'Tom Brown's" Rugby^ 
and still inhabited by one of his family. Accord- 
ing to an inscription upon its eastern wall, the pic- 
turesque gabled cottage was erected by Arnold in 
1833. Its chimneys are believed to have been de- 
signed by Wordsworth. Its situation is one of 
surpassing loveliness, and Miss Bronte, who visited 
the place with Mrs. Gaskell, found ** the valley 
and hills around beautiful as imagination could 
dream." Here that <* apostle of light and sweet- 
ness, ' ' Matthew Arnold, and his poet-friend Arthur 
Clough, inspirer ot "The Scholar- Gypsy," 

195 



Literary Rambles 

walked and wrote together for weeks at a time, and 
found in the scenery about them and in the com- 
panionship of the bard of Rydal Mount spirit and 
impulse for works not soon to be forgotten. Nearer 
the foot of rocky Loughrigg Fell dwells Mr. Gordon 
Wordsworth, a grandson of the poet, who cherishes 
here in his Stepping Stones Cottage many rehcs and 
souvenirs of ** the water- drinking bard." 

Rydal Mount, the home in which Wordsworth 
hved last and longest, must ever be a goal for the 
literary rambler in Lakeland. We find it nestled 
among half-concealing foHage on the rocky slope of 
Nab Scar, a few rods out of the Grasmere road. 
The oft-described dwelling has been changed a little 
since the poet inhabited it : the windows have been 
enlarged, the interior arrangement has been modi- 
fied somewhat, and the apartments decorated in 
more modern fashion ; but the form and size of the 
house are essentially unaltered, it remains the same 
modest ** cottage-like building" that Mrs. Hemans 
described, and the accredited pilgrim may identify 
the rooms in which great poems were penned and 
illustrious visitors were entertained. ** Ivy never 
sere ' ' drapes the low portal and riots upon the 
weather-worn walls, and on every hand is a pro- 
fusion of foliage and flowers which, together with 
its location, renders the place the perfect realization 
of our ideal of a poet's home. 

196 



Wordsworth's Rydal Mount 

Much of the loveliness of the spot is of Words- 
worth's creation : greensward and garden, terrace 
and copse, are of his planning and planting, and 
these remain, with other objects once dear to his 
vision. The plumy pines still stand guard about 
the gate ; this great ash is yet the haunt of the 
*' tuneful thrush"; here are the <*Rydalian 
Laurels" of his sonnet, some of them reared by 
him from slips taken by his own hand from the 
tree planted by Petrarch at Virgil's tomb ; yonder 
is the terrace walk beneath whose archway of 
foliage the poet paced or sat while he ** murmured 
out many thousands of his verses, ' ' and where he 
recited to Emerson three just completed sonnets on 
Fingal's Cave. 

Behind the house rise the craggy steeps of Nab 
Scar ; in other directions extend glorious views em- 
bracing the Grasmere vale, with its embosomed lake ; 
the picturesque Rydal Water, with its foliage-fringed 
shores and fairy islets ; the overhanging Loughrigg 
Fell ; and the Rotha valley away to the azure of 
Windermere. The abundant beauties of these 
scenes were the unceasing delight of the poet as 
well as the inspiration of many of the poems writ- 
ten here with mountain, mere, and vale blessing 
his sight. Mrs. Wordsworth was wont to say that 
living amid these landscapes "made one unwilling 
to die when the time came" ; perhaps it was to 

197 



Literary Rambles 

detach her afFections from this environment that 
physical vision was gradually w^ithdrav^n from her 
years before her death. 

Hither Wordsworth removed in 1 8 1 3 to escape 
from the sad associations of the Grasmere rectory, 
where two of his children had died ; and from this 
home were sent forth **The Excursion," "Even- 
ing Ode," **Laodamia," and many poems whose 
sweetness and beauty fixed the place of the poet 
among the singers of the age. To Wordsworth 
here came Emerson, Southey, Mrs. Hemans, 
Ruskin, Martineau, Mrs. Howe, and an endless 
procession of admirers from many lands ; here that 
erratic genius De Quincey long haunted house and 
garden; Arnold, Clough, and the genial **Kit 
North ' ' were at times daily visitants, and poor 
Hartley Coleridge spent here the most tranquil 
hours of his unhappy existence. Here Words- 
worth dwelt for thirty-seven years of spotless life ; 
here he beatified the marriage of his daughter, the 
beloved **Dora" of his poems, and mourned her 
untimely death ; here, with the words ** Going to 
Dora ' ' upon his lips, he passed to join 

" The dead yet sceptred sovereigns who still rule 
Our spirits from their urns." 

Here his wife tarried nine years behind him, and 
breathed out her life in the same chamber which 

198 



Wordsworth — De Quincey — Coleridge 

had witnessed his death ; and here now a great- 
granddaughter of the bard inhabits the home which 
will be forever associated with the fame and genius 
of Wordsworth. 

A lowly roadside tenement, with vines clamber- 
ing above its door, stands in a quaint garden by 
the lakelet a few furlongs from Rydal Mount. 
This is Nab Cottage, where De Quincey wooed and 
won his ** Electra," Margaret Simpson, and where 
Hartley Coleridge passed twelve years of the ** Ufe 
of alternating brilliancy and tragedy ' ' which ended 
here one wintry day of 1849. Poems Hke ** On 
Prayer," ** Prometheus," "Once I was Young 
and Fancy was my All," and the sonnet on 
*' Homer " were here the fruits of ** laal Harley's " 
melancholy genius. Wordsworth was then a fre- 
quent visitor at this cottage, constant in ministra- 
tions when the evil habit of its inmate prostrated 
him and, as foreseen in Wordsworth's poem to 
**H. C, Six Years Old," 

" Pain was his guest, 
Lord of his house and hospitality ; ' ' 

when poor Coleridge lay dying here it was the 
gray-haired poet laureate who knelt by his bedside 
to pray and receive the last sacrament with the son 
of his old friend. 

A little way beyond, Grasmerevale holds a tiny 
199 



Literary Rambles 

stone dwelling which is the most popular and in- 
teresting shrine of pilgrimage in all this region of 
poetic shades : for us the Dove Cottage is illumined 
by memories of the sons of genius who have dwelt 
or sojourned beneath its roof, and its lowly rooms 
are forever hallowed by the works which have been 
written within them. Six years before Words- 
worth wrote in "The Waggoner," 

" where the * Dove and Olive Bough ' 
Once hung, a Poet harbors now, 
A simple water-drinking bard," 

this quondam wayside inn had become his habita- 
tion ; De Quincey succeeded the poet in a pro- 
tracted tenancy of the little dwelling ; later it was 
the abode of a simple cottager, and after various 
vicissitudes it has now become, through the enthu- 
siasm of some of Wordsworth's admirers, the prop- 
erty of the nation. 

To this nest-like retreat in the heart of his native 
hills Wordsworth came in 1799 with elfin-faced 
Dorothy, the sister whose life-long love and devo- 
tion he sang in his verse. Here for some years 
they hved alone upon an annual income of eighty 
pounds, Dorothy doing servant's service in the 
kitchen, and Wordsworth laboring in the garden, 
cultivating the vegetables, preparing the fiiel, per- 
forming rudest tasks with his hands, and pondering 

200 



the moEi ^ 
' of pilgrimjjige m all tl 
the Dove Cotta^ 
.1 the sons of genius who have <. 
•^^ath its roof, and its lowly roun • 
d bv the works which have been 
ix years before Words- 
worr: The Waggoner,' 

v-? and Olive Bough * 



Ml 



....v,„. ... «..,. ..^c.;. ;.. liis native 
came in 1799 with elfin-faced 
Doi.jfi)/, the sister whose life-long love and devo- 
•'on he sang r some year 

:hey lived ale an annual income of e'' 

■'!r>ds, Dorc.. v^iiig servant's service iii -. 
.', and Wordsworth laboring in the garden, 
caltiv aetables, preparing the fuel, per- 

iorming * !xS with his hands, and pondering 

200 



Wordsworth at Dove Cottage 

meanwhile the poems which he and Dorothy later 
put into form to celebrate **the outward life of nature 
and the inward life of the soul. ' ' To the bard in 
this homelet came, in 1800, "that inspired charity- 
boy," Coleridge, for the first of his prolonged 
sojourns, bringing with him the marvelous lad 
Hartley; next came the gentle '*Elia," enticed 
for once away from his beloved London ; and a 
little later guests like the learned Davy, Southey 
the blameless, and Scott, ** the Wizard of the 
North," came and went through the humble door- 
way. Hither, in 1802, Wordsworth brought 
home Mary Hutchinson to be his wife ; here his 
adored **Dora" was born, as well as the daughter 
Catherine, — described in his ** Characteristics of a 
Child Three Years Old," — who became the idol of 
De Quincey, and whose early death almost crazed 
with grief that aphelxian dreamer. 

It was during his residence in this abode that 
Wordsworth reached the zenith of his poetic inspi- 
ration and power, and produced his highest and 
best of song : here were begotten Matthew, the 
Wanderer, the Solitary, the Pastor, the Waggoner, 
and many another of his characters who, for us, 
still inhabit the surrounding vales and mountains ; 
here were written **The Prelude," ''The DaiFo- 
dils," *'The Recluse," *'The Solitary Reaper," 
the ** Ode on Intimations of Immortahty," most 

201 



Literary Rambles 

of the second volume of ** Lyrical Ballads,'' — 
poems some of which, in all time to come, will draw 
men's hearts. 

In this house the shy De Quincey made, when 
a young man of twenty-two, the memorable first 
visit to Wordsworth, which he so lucidly described, 
and two years later — the Wordsworths having re- 
moved to Allan Bank — Dorothy carpeted and 
fitted the diminutive Dove Cottage for the bachelor 
home of De Quincey, who occupied it, with occa- 
sional absences, for more than twenty years. He 
brought with him the baneful opium habit, and here 
he completely succumbed to the Circean spells of 
the narcotic. Dove Cottage was the scene of the 
experiences detailed in ** The Confessions of an 
Opium-Eater," — his ghastly horrors, his despon- 
dency, his tempestuous struggles against the dominion 
of the fell drug, his partial triumph, — all real pas- 
sages of his own life. In 1 8 1 6 he married his 
<* dear M." and brought her to this abode from 
the adjacent farm, and it was in preparation for his 
wedding that he ** descended suddenly from three 
hundred and twenty grains of opium per day to 
forty grains," with the delightful results pictured in 
the second part of the ** Confessions." It was 
not until 1830 that De Quincey finally relinquished 
Dove Cottage. 

The cozy dwelling has suffered little change, and, 
202 



De Quincey at Dove Cottage 

thanks to the care with which the trustees have re- 
stored and preserved the place, the literary pilgrim 
may see house and garden in the same quaint and 
simple beauty which was familiar to Wordsworth 
and his friends. It was from this same lowly 
doorway that De Quincey beheld the Easter Sunday 
morning vision of his opium dream. The heavy 
entrance-door still admits to the lower apartment, 
" half kitchen, half parlor," with fireplace, lat- 
ticed window, dark woodwork, and stone floor just 
as Wordsworth knew them. In this room he re- 
ceived many of his callers; here Coleridge some- 
times slept ; before this fireplace he and Dorothy 
often sat and talked ** of all dear things " till three 
o'clock in the morning; here, too, De Quincey saw 
the turbaned Malay whose appearance gave for 
months an oriental imagery to the opium-eater's 
dreams. 

A narrow stair leads to a dusk, low-ceiled room 
above, contrived — " a double debt to pay " — as sit- 
ting-room and study. Here Wordsworth's three 
hundred books were shelved in the recess beside the 
fireplace, and here " The Recluse," *' My Daugh- 
tei- Dora," and other poems were dictated to Dor- 
othy, and many more copied and polished frcm first 
drafts brought in from the orchard or from farther 
walks abroad. Here Wordsworth listened to 
Lamb's letters on the ** Lyrical Ballads " ; here he 

203 



Literary Rambles 

recited to the divine day-dreamer, Coleridge, the 
earlier books of ** The Excursion," and the latter 
repeatedly read to his friend the second part of 
** Christabel" as it was in process of composition. 
This is the room, ** populous with books," which 
De Quincey depicted so vividly in the ** Confes- 
sions ' * : then his five thousand volumes lined 
these walls, a fire blazed upon this hearth, a 
little table held a decanter of ruby-colored lauda- 
num, by which De Quincey sat and sipped and 
read German metaphysics nearly the whole night 
through. The lovely young tea-maker of his 
picture was his wife, who passed in this cottage 
the greater part of her married life. 

The small room adjoining was Wordsworth's 
bedchamber, later occupied by De Quincey, who, 
tended by his faithfiil "Electra," here fought 
with the phantoms of his waking fancy or was 
scourged by horror-haunted sleep. The room be- 
neath this was Dorothy Wordsworth's, and, from 
the landing, steps lead to an addition made by De 
Quincey to hold his overflow of books. In the 
principal apartment we find the collection of Words- 
worthiana donated by Professor Knight ; the gift 
includes also portraits, manuscripts, and hundreds 
of letters and rehcs which are to be here preserved. 

Adjoining the cottage is the secluded ''plot of 
orchard-ground," with its abundant foliage and 
flowers, its precious suggestions, its wealth of poetic 

204 



Literary Associations of Dove Cottage 

associations ; here wells the poet's spring, here are 
the trees he planted, the steps he cut, the spaces he 
tilled, the *'rock seat" prepared for him by Cole- 
ridge's loving hands. This is the 

*' Sweet orchard-garden eminently fair," 

sung with varying phrase in many of his stanzas; 
and, as we rest here, we interweave with its 
shades memories of <'The Sparrow's Nest," 
*' The Daisy," «* The Cuckoo," *' The Butter- 
fly, ' ' and other poems produced while Wordsworth 
worked or walked in this fragrant retreat. Here 
Coleridge, the ** most fascinating talker in Eng- 
land," loitered in converse with Dorothy during 
long moonht hours ; here played the child Hartley 
Coleridge, the *' spirit that danced on an aspen 
leaf"; here Southey read to the little circle his 
metrical romance '* Thalaba "; here De Quincey 
mused apart in the dim, mystical realm lie loved, 
or charmed his friends with the sweet and subtle 
flow of his speech. 

Dwellings have multiplied about the once se- 
cluded cottage, but the environment retains much 
of its air of repose and its essential features of beauty; 
we see the same ** depth of vale below and height 
of hills above ' ' ; but a few rods from the cottage 
door lies placid Grasmere, with 

*' Its own green island and its winding shores " 
205 



Literary Rambles 

and farther are the ** warm woods," "sunny- 
hills," and *' fresh green fields" of which Words- 
worth sang in ** The Recluse," as lovely now as 
when they were his daily haunt. 

Allan Bank, at the farther end of the crystal 
mere, was the residence of Wordsworth for three 
years after his removal from Dove Cottage. Dur- 
ing half this term Coleridge shared the home with 
him and De Quincey was his daily visitor ; we 
may imagine something of the quality of the con- 
versations then heard within that abode. The 
Grasmere rectory, where Wordsworth dwelt when 
his children Catherine and Thomas died, has been 
rebuilt, but the quaint gray old church of *' The 
Excursion," in which he worshiped for half a 
century, yet uprears its ** large and massy pile" 
from the opposite side of the highway. Within 
we find the features commemorated in the poem, — 
the pillars, the hewn timbers ** like leafless under- 
boughs, ' ' the * * admonitory texts ' ' upon the an- 
cient walls, — and, near the place of his pew, is a 
marble tablet with a portrait of the poet erected by 
his friends and neighbors ** in testimony of their 
respect, affection, and gratitude." 

Within the shadow of the battlemented church- 
tower is the peacefiil God's acre where, lulled by 
bird and breeze and stream, Wordsworth sleeps 
amid the scenes over which the glow of his genius 
has wrapped its light. Near him here lies the Parson 

206 



Grasmere Church and Churchyard 

of his ^' Excursion'*; above him sway and murmur 
the yews he rooted; his beloved Rotha, ** singing 
him its best," glides by the foot of the near wall. 
With him in the same grave reposes his wife, be- 
side him lie the devoted sister Dorothy and the 
daughter Dora whose death hastened his own and 
stopped forever the current of his song. 

Here, too, rests Catherine Wordsworth, the 
child whom De Quincey so passionately loved, and 
upon whose little grave he often lay the whole 
night long in intensity of yearning to be near his 
lost companion. A few feet distant, in a spot 
selected by Wordsworth and marked now by a 
cruciform stone, is the sepulcher where the aged 
poet helped to lay the wasted body of poor Hart- 
ley Coleridge one snowy winter day but a few 
months before his own burial here. Within the 
same inclosure is the simple cenotaph of one known 
and loved in America as well as in England — the 
gifted Arthur Hugh Clough, whose ashes repose in 
far-away Florence. Loving hands have placed 
here above his mother's grave a plain slab in his 
remembrance; upon it are graven lines which Ten- 
nyson wrote "In Memoriam" of another Arthur 
whom he also loved. 

Grasmere is a delightful place of summer sojourn 
whence days of "splendid strolling" in the foot- 
steps of poets and literators make us familiar with 

207 



Literary Rambles 

scenes they have haunted and hallowed. One 
day our way is over **The Kirk stone Pass" of 
Wordsworth's poem, and by the Brothers' Water 
where his * * Written in March ' ' was composed, 
to Ullswater (the *< Ulfo's lake" of Scott), on 
whose marge the golden daffodils yet flutter and 
dance as in the day they inspired Wordsworth's 
matchless lyric, and to picturesque Aira Force, the 
scene of his pathetic ballad, ** The Somnambulist." 
Returning, we **chmb the dark brow of the mighty 
Helvellyn ' ' in the track of Scott, Wordsworth, 
and Davy, and follow that trio to the spot in the 
bosom of the mountain — 



*' A lofty precipice in front, 
A silent tarn below " — 



where young Gough perished and his dog kept 
vigil by his body until discovered by a shepherd 
three months after the accident. Scott's ** Hel- 
vellyn " and Wordsworth's ** Fidelity " celebrate 
the faithfulness of the dog, and the place is now 
marked by a monument erected by Canon Rawns- 
ley and Frances Power Cobbe. 

In other days we fare to Hawkshead, where we 
see the school in which Wordsworth was eight 
years a pupil, with its old walls and the oaken 
bench which bears his name carved in boyish 
characters, the quaint old house where he lodged 

208 



Scenes of Many Poems 

with Dame Tyson and wrote his first poems, the 
church sitting **like a throned lady" above the 
ancient village, the grassy churchyard upon the 
slope, and other scenes over which he lingers lov- 
ingly in his "Prelude"; or to far Cockermouth, 
where we find the plain, square, factory-like dwell- 
ing in which Wordsworth was born, the garden 
where he played as a child, and that "tempting 
playmate," the Derwent, that ** blent its murmurs 
with his nurse's song"; or we trace that once 
** fairest of all rivers " to Bassenthwaite, upon whose 
shores Lord Houghton, Fitzgerald (the translator of 
Omar's **Rubaiyat"), Tennyson, and the sage of 
Chelsea sojourned with the Speddings. Here Car- 
lyle rested after the completion of his ** Frederick 
the Great," and here Tennyson revised and pol- 
ished his " Morte D' Arthur." 

In one memorable jaunt a poet of our own time 
is our guide and companion. First to the chapel- 
yard where was buried Owen Lloyd, the subject of 
Wordsworth's touching ** Epitaph " ; farther up the 
valley we visit the wild Dungeon Ghyll fall, so 
accurately described in his ** Idle Shepherd Boys "; 
thence — the miles becoming more steep, savage, 
and solitary as we proceed — we press on to Sty- 
head Pass and climb the rugged acclivities of that 
monarch of England's mountains, Scafell Pike. We 
find the reward of our exertions in the magnificent 
N 209 



Literary Rambles 

view which Wordsworth portrayed in some of the 
best passages of his prose. 

Mountains <* stern and earthquake-tossed" are 
about us on every hand; the ** battlemented front of 
Scafell ' ' towers close by, with wild Wastwater at 
its foot and the classic vale of Wordsworth's <* long- 
loved Duddon " — of which he sang in thirty-four 
sonnets — just beyond. Farther is the lofty ** Black 
Comb ' ' of his poem, and on the horizon shines 
the summer sea. In another direction opens the 
storied Borrowdale and the Great Gable uprears the 
summit whence Carlyle beheld the mountain pros- 
pect he pictured in ** Sartor Resartus." Away to 
the left lies gloomy Ennerdale; the Pillar *' rises 
like a column from the vale ' ' in the mid-distance; 
and, across a score of tumultuous mountains, we see 
the shoreland where the poet of * * The Faerie 
Queen ' * is said to have wooed the * * gray-eyed 
maiden of St. Bees." 

By way of the lowly vale of the Blea Tarn and 
the little stone-floored cottage where dwelt the 
Solitary of Wordsworth's ** Excursion" we walk 
to the beautiful lakeside retreat of Ruskin. Some- 
time the abode of the poet Gerald Massey, who 
was the model for George Eliot's ** Felix Holt," 
Brantwood has also been tenanted by Mrs. Lynn 
Linton, who here wrote her *'Lake Country," 
and for above a quarter of a century it was famous 

2IO 



Home of Ruskiji 

as the chosen retirement in which the great author 
of ** Modern Painters" was spending the evening 
of his pure and passionless life. 

Brantwood overlooks Coniston Lake from the 
eastern shore; its lawns decline to the water-edge; 
its woods half encircle the house and clothe the 
steeps hehind. The place owes much besides its 
renown to the ownership of Ruskin: the house 
was enlarged and embellished by him, the beauties 
of the grounds are largely of his planning and pro- 
duction, the orchard was planted by his own hands, 
he laid out and cultivated the near-by garden, his 
arm felled the trees to open the walks along the 
wooded hillside. The mansion is a spacious, ir- 
regular, two-storied edifice of stucco, mantled by 
climbing vines; a larch- shaded way leads to the 
Doric porch that shelters the entrance. 

We are permitted to see the principal apart- 
ments, with their charming window- vistas and 
their precious contents, — minerals, manuscripts, 
coins, curios, and numerous gems of art, including 
the Turner masterpieces and some of Ruskin' s own 
sketches and drawings, — remaining mostly undis- 
turbed since the master arranged them here. Ad- 
jacent to the dining-room is the sanctuary of the 
place, the flower-decked study, — its bay-window 
overlooking the lake,— where much of Ruskin' s later 
literary tasks were wrought, whence he sent forth 

211 



Literary Rambles 

his last message to the world, and where his body 
lay in state awaiting burial. Above the study is 
the chamber in which he died, filled, like the other 
apartments, with articles of vertu and rare works 
of art. 

His ' ' Praeterita ' ' reveals his enduring love for 
this neighborhood, which he had visited as a child. 
The same book describes, in the beloved *' Joanna," 
his cousin Mrs. Arthur Severn, wife of the son of 
Keats' s guardian friend, to whose care Ruskin ascribed 
* ' more than Hfe for many and many a year, ' ' who 
long presided over his home and devotedly cher- 
ished and tended him in his age and decadence, and 
who, with her husband, now owns the estate of 
Brantwood, and, in accordance with the master's 
will, maintains it in the condition in which it was 
when he died. 

A friend of Ruskin' s sits with us upon the mas- 
ter' s accustomed seat by the shore, and conducts us 
up his woodland path to his outlook on the moor, 
whence we gaze upon the prospect which, during 
many years, he daily beheld : — Scott's *' mighty 
Helvellyn," Martineau's <*dear old Fairfield," 
and many other minor peaks, the near lake with its 
sentinel hills, and Coniston Old Man with the sun 
setting in roseate splendor behind his rugged heights. 
At the mountain's foot nestles the gray village hi 
whose little churchyard, among his beloved pines 

212 



Ruskin — Rossetti — Hall Calne 

and deodars and close by the graves of the friends 
to whom were addressed the famous letters of his 
** Hortus Inclusus," Ruskin sleeps beneath a wreath 
of his favorite flowers. 

His biographer, Collingwood, lives not far from 
Ruskin' s former home, Tennyson stayed for a time 
a little farther up the lake, and upon the opposite 
shore is the ancient hall where Sir Philip Sidney 
was often the guest of the Countess of Pembroke. 

Dorothy Wordsworth once walked from Gras- 
mere to Keswick in four hours and twenty-five 
minutes ; at a more leisurely pace we follow her 
track past **Wythburn's modest house of prayer '* 
(it has been embellished with a bell-tower since 
Wordsworth described it) to Thirlmere. Beside a 
pool of Fisher's Ghyll we found a solitary little 
farmhouse in which Rossetti passed some part of his 
last year and accomplished his last work. Here, 
too, he meditated a ballad *' illustrative of the ser- 
pent fascination of beauty ' ' ; and here Hall Caine, 
who was Rossetti' s companion, contemplated writ- 
ing his first novel and founding it upon a Cumbrian 
tradition heard from his maternal grandfather. 

The region of Caine' s early fiction, into which he 
has woven so much of local dialect and folk-lore, 
lies around us here at Thirlmere. Wythburn is a 
central scene of his ** Shadow of a Crime," Thirl- 

213 



Literary Rambles 

mere is his " Bracken Water " and Shoulthwaite 
and Fornside are in the vicinage ; westward, just 
beyond Der went water, is the drowsy vale of New- 
lands, the theater of his *«A Son of Hagar," 
where we may see the mines, the place of the Rit- 
son homestead by the base of Eel Crags, of the 
humbler dwelling of poor Mercy and the charcoal- 
burner farther up the dale, the summit of the lofty 
fell where Hugh went to die at daybreak, and other 
scenes of that exciting tale. 

A plain, square two-storied house standing in 
the midst of a garden and shrubbery by the junc- 
tion of the Keswick and Threlkeld roads was 
purchased by Caine from the proceeds of his play 
** Ben-my-Chree," and was for four years his 
home. In his study here ''The Bondman" was 
completed and portions of a **Life of Christ'* 
and ** The Scapegoat" were written. From 
Thirlmere we take the longer way by the beautiful 
vale of St. John, along Scott's ''winding brook- 
let," and through the scenes of his own heart's 
romance as well as those of his "Bridal of Trier- 
main." 

Nearer Keswick is the cottage to which Shelley 
came in the honeymoon, bearing with him his girl- 
wife, the Harriet to whom he dedicated " Queen 
Mab," and whose young life was to end so 
pitiably. The dwelling has been enlarged and 

214 



Shelley — Summit of Skiddaw 

altered, but we still see the neat little bay- windowed 
room where Southey and his wife visited the youth- 
ful pair, and where Shelley sat to write the tale of 
** Hubert Cauvin" and many short poems and 
essays. About the place are trees and flowering 
shrubs which the Shelley s must have known, and 
the garden in which they *'ran about when they 
were tired of sitting in the house," as Mrs. Shelley 
told a visitor, remains, though now considerably 
diminished. 

Looking down from the grassy slopes of Skid- 
daw, with Keswick at our feet and a measureless 
expanse of sea, mountains, lakes, and vales greeting 
our vision, we think rather of the many of the 
guild of letters who have dwelt or sojourned within 
this wide horizon. Upon the lofty summit we 
are subtly conscious of the companionship of starry 
spirits — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Keats, 
Rogers, Lockhart, Charles and Mary Lamb, and 
others whom, we may not forget — who have stood 
where we now stand and have gazed in rapture 
upon these inspiring landscapes. While we linger 
here the memory of one incongruous incident will 
intrude itself upon the sober reveries which the 
place evokes: one night in the summer of i8 15, 
Southey, Wordsworth, and *'Rag, Tag, and Bob- 
tail ' ' came to this summit and celebrated the victory 
at Waterloo by a great bonfire, and many of the 

215 



Literary Rambles 

company became hilariously intoxicated because, in 
the excitement of the occasion, Wordsworth kicked 
over the water, and the stimulants had to be taken 
undiluted. 

After a morning's exploration of the rugged 
chasm where ** the water comes down at Lodore" 
far less copiously than Southey's lyric has led us to 
expect, we visit the old hall which was so long the 
habitation of that pure-hearted bard. Coleridge 
first dwelt in Greta Hall, and it was his accounts of 
the country to his brother-in-law Southey that in-* 
duced the latter to come and share this house with 
him. A year after Southey's arrival Coleridge 
began his wanderings, and soon ceased altogether 
to return to the place, leaving his family to the 
care and support of the beneficent Southey. 

Here Coleridge wrote the wondrous ode * * De- 
jection " and the second part of " Christabel," 
and here was born his daughter Sara, one of **the 
lovely Three" of Wordsworth's ** Triad." In 
1803 Southey began here the life of scholarly se- 
clusion and unwearied literary labor which was to 
continue in this place through four decades, and 
from which proffers of a baronetcy, of a seat in the 
House of Commons, of a richly salaried editorship 
failed to allure him. 

The hall crowns a green bank beside the mur-t 
muring "Greta" of which Wordsworth sang. 

216 



Home of Coleridge and Southey 

Behind it towers massive Skiddaw; about it are 
ample gardens which slope to the river, and great 
trees beneath which Southey walked, Coleridge 
lay and dreamed, and Charles Lamb sometime dis- 
ported with his ** minutest of minute philosophers,'* 
the boy Hartley. The house is a square stuccoed 
edifice of three stories, with a curved extension at 
either end. Coleridge occupied the rooms at the 
left of the central entrance, Southey those at the 
right. On the lower floor we see the dining and 
breakfast rooms which the poets called ** Peter" 
and "Paul." Above is the great study — so 
large 'Southey declared that in it he <* at first felt 
like a cock-robin in an empty church." From its 
large windows we behold the natural beauties 
which were the poet' s solace and delight, and which 
he pictured in his ''Vision of Judgment" — the 
flashing lakes, the smiling valley, the billowy moun- 
tains "reaching half way to heaven." Here he 
sat to write much of his poetry and more than 
thirty volumes of lucid and pohshed prose, besides 
hundreds of essays and articles for periodicals ; and 
here, after his mind was clouded, he lingered among 
his books, fondly patting them or softly turning 
their leaves when he no longer comprehended their 
contents. 

The smaller room north of this was Coleridge's 
study, and near by is the chamber in which 

217 



Literary Rambles 

Southey's wife, the Edith to whom his ''Joan of 
Arc ' ' and many earlier poems were dedicated, 
died after the long period of mental unsoundness 
which drew from Wordsworth the poem '' Oh, 
What a Wreck ! ' ' Throughout her sad affliction 
Southeywas her comforter and guardian, and this 
room, which was the scene of his tender ministra- 
tions, witnessed also the final release of his own 
darkened spirit. 

A few furlongs from his home we find in Cross- 
thwaite church the altar-tomb erected in memory of 
the gentle-hearted Southey. One end bears Words- 
worth's touching tribute to his friend, and reclin- 
ing upon the base, book in hand, is a marble 
effigy which inadequately represents the personal 
beauty of the bard whom Byron once called *' the 
best-looking poet he had known." A well-worn 
path leads through the churchyard to the low slab 
of slate that indicates the spot Southey chose for his 
burial. One boisterous March morning, while the 
white-haired Wordsworth stood in the storm by 
the grave, the wreck of poor Southey was laid in 
** the insensate earth " here, beside his wife and 
children, and here, with giant Skiddaw overlooking 
his sepulcher, he awaits the resurrection that may 
restore his genius and power. 



218 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Dr. Charles C, 106-115 ; Home and Work, 107- 
lio; Scenes of Books, no— 115. 

Agnew, Mary, 27. 

Akenside, Dr. Mark, mentioned, 156. 

Allan Bank, 206. 

Ailing House, Newark, 44. 

Alio way, 172-176. 

Ambleside, 194-196. 

Aram, Eugene, mentioned, 190; see "A Literary Pilgrim- 
age," 144-147. 

Ardsley, 18. 

Arnold, Edwin, mentioned, 90. 

Arnold, George, 40. 

Arnold, Matthew, 122, 195, 196, 198. 

Arnold, Thomas (Dr.), mentioned, 198 ; at Fox How, 195. 

Artemus Ward, 17, 136. 

Audubon, John J., 17, 91 ; see "Literary Haunts and 
Homes," 91. 

Ayr, Old, 170-173, 177, 188. 

Ayrshire, 170-189 5 see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 1 81-201. 

Bangs, John Kendrick, Home of, 18. 

Barr, Amelia E., at Cornwall, 29. 

Bassenthwaite, 209. 

"Ben Bolt," About, 50, 51, 52. 

Bentham, Jeremy, mentioned, 41. 

Benton, Joel, 31. 

Besant, Sir Walter, 140. 

Betterton, Thomas, mentioned, 136. 

Beverley, N. J., 100, loi. 

Bigelow, John, Home on Hudson, 23. 

Black, William, 126, 138. 

221 



Index 

Blunt, Lady Anne, 165. 
Blunt, Sir Wilfrid, 165. 
*' Bonnie Jean," Burns's, I.76, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 

188. 
Booth, Mary L., 80. 
Bordentown, 103—106. 
Bourne, Vincent, mentioned, 121. 
Brantwood, Ruskin's, 210-213. 
Bronte, Charlotte, 190—192, 193, 1955 see '*A Literary 

Pilgrimage," 121-135, 207-225. 
Brooks, Noah, 42, 49. 
Browning, Elizabeth B., 48, 141. 
Browning, Robert, 48, 141, 142. 
Bruce, James, 145. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 16, 23, 31, 41, 49, 181, 182, 183, 

184, 186, 187 ; see " Literary Haunts and Homes," 65, 

136-142. 
Buchanan, Robert, 90. 
Bucke, Dr. R. M., 87, 90. 
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 143. 

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, mentioned, 121, 141. 
Burlington, 10,1—103. 
Burns, Robert, Birthplace, 172-174; Homes, 170, 173, 176, 

177, 185 ; Scenes of Poems, 171, 173, 174, 175, 178, 

179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187. 
Burnsland, 170—189 ; see " A Literary Pilgrimage," 164—166, 

181-206. 
Burr, Aaron, 36, 43, 44. 
Burritt, Elihu, mentioned, 136. 

Burroughs, John, mentioned, 90 ; Homes of, 31—34. 
Butler, Samuel, mentioned, 122. 
Butler, William Allen, 18. 
Byron, Ada, 154, 159, 162, 163, 165-168. 
Byron, Lady, 159, 167, 169. 

222 



Index 

Byron, Lord, 125, 141 ; at Harrow School, 146-155 ; Tomb, 
157—169; see " A Literary Pilgrimage," 62—90, 226— 
236. 

Caine, Hall, 213, 214; at Keswick, 214; Seats of Fiction, 
213, 214. 

Camden, 86-95, 97—99 ; see "Literary Shrines," 201-217. 

Campbell, Thomas, mentioned, 170. 

Canning, George, mentioned, 193. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 121, 141, 190, 209, 210; see "A Liter- 
ary Pilgrimage," 33—35, 162—164, 167-170. 

Carrick, 189. 

Catskills, 35. 

Cedar Lawn, Headley's, 29, 30. 

Century Club, 40. 

Charlcote, 138, 139. 

Charles Town, Stockton at, 77, 78. 

Chateaubriand, Viscount de, 45. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 122. 

Cha worth, Mary Ann, 153, 154, 157 ; see " A Literary Pil- 
grimage," 71-79. 

Chelsea, 121 ; see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 28—37. 

Cherry Croft, Mrs. Barr's, 29. 

Childs, George WiUiam, 35. 

Chiswick, 121. 

*' Christopher North," 192, 193, 198. 

Churchill, Winston, Homes of, 18, 19. 

Cincinnati, Society of, 30. 

Claremont Hill, 16. 

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 19. 

Clemens, Samuel L., *' Mark Twain," mentioned, 138 ; see 

** Literary Haunts and Homes," 195-198. 
** Clementine," Mrs. Howarth, 90, 115-118. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 195, 196, 198 ; Cenotaph, 207. 
Cobbe, Frances Power, 208. 

223 



Index 

Cobbett, William, 121. 

Cockermouth, 209. 

Cockloft Hall, 42, 55-58. 

Cold Spring, N. Y., 23-25. 

Coleridge, Hartley, 193, 198, 201, 217; Grave, 207 ; Nab 

Cottage, 199. 
Coleridge, Samuel T., 156, 206, 215 5 at Dove Cottage, 201, 

204, 205 ; at Greta Hall, 216, 217. 
Coles, Dr. Abraham, 43, 47, 49. 
Collingwood, 213. 
Collins, Wilkie, mentioned, 138. 
Communipaw, 40. 
Compton Wynyates, 122. 
Coniston, 211, 212, 213. 
Constitution Island, Miss Warner's, 20-22. 
Convent, New Jersey, Stockton, 69—73. 
Conway, Moncure D., mentioned, 90, 138. 
Cook, Clarence, 31. 
Cook, Eliza, 143. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 15, 30, 35, 39, 40, 100, 102; 

Birthplace, loi 5 see "Literary Haunts and Homes," 

154-173- 
Cornwall, 25-29. 
Cowley, Abraham, 121. 
Cozzens, Frederick S., 17. 
Crabbe, George, mentioned, 41. 
Craigenputtock, Carlyle's, 190 ; see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 

167-170. 
Craik, Dinah Mulock, 1225 see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 

92. 
Crane, Stephen, 42 ; Birthplace, 46. 
Crichton, James, 189. 
Cro' Nest, 23. 
Crossthwaite, 218. 

224 



Index 

Cruikshank, George, 142. 

Culprit Fay, The, 23. 

Cumnor, 122. 

Cunningham, Allan, 143, 181. 

Curtis, George William, 39. 

Cuvier, Baron, mentioned, 44. 

Dana, Richard H., mentioned, 26. 

Davy, Sir Humphry, mentioned, 201, 208. 

Delaware River, On the, 86, 1 00-118. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 140, 192, 193, 198, 199, 206, 207 ; 
at Dove Cottage, 200-205. 

De Trobriand, Philip Regis, mentioned, 26. 

Dickens, Charles, 125, 138, 141, 142, 144, 156 ; see "A 
Literary Pilgrimage," 49-61. 

Dodge, Mary Mapes, 47, 70. 

Donder Berg, 20. 

Doon, The, 175, 176. 

Douglas, Amanda M., Home, 59, 60. 

Dove Cottage, 199—206. 

Drake, Jos. Rodman, 23 ; see ** Literary Haunts and Homes," 
39, 100-103. 

Drayton, Michael, 1 35, 136. 

Du Mauri er, George, 52, 142, 156. 

Duyvel's Dans Kamer, 31. 

Dyer, John, mentioned, 122. 

Eastlake, Sir Charles, 143. 

Elleray, 193. 

Emerson, R. W., 85, 90, 190, 195, 197, 198 ; see "Lit- 
erary Shrines," 45-51, 77, 78. 

English, Dr. Thomas Dunn, 42, 43, 102 ; at Home, 49-53. 

Fawcett, Arthur, 41. 

Fay, Theodore Sedgwick, mentioned, 16. 

Field, David Dudley, 18. 

Fielding, Henry, mentioned, 121. 

o 225 



Index 

Fields, James T., mentioned, 26. 

Fishkill, 30. 

Fishkill-on-Hudson, 30, 31. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, mentioned, 209. 

Forney, John W., mentioned, 90. 

Foster, John Y., 47. 

Fox How, Arnold's, 195. 

Frost, Arthur B., 71. 

Fulham, 121. 

Garrick, David, mentioned, 136. 

Garth, Sir Samuel, 150. 

Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn, 193, 195. 

George Eliot, mentioned, 122, 195, 210 j see "A Literary 

Pilgrimage," 91—105. 
Gibbon, Edward, 121. 

Gilder, Jeanette L., 42, 43, 46, 47, 105, 106, 114. 
Gilder, Joseph, 105, 106, 114. 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 42, 43, 46, 47, 105, 106, 116. 
Glasgow, 170. 

Goethe, von, Johann W., mentioned, 41. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, mentioned, 156. 
Grange, The, Philipse's, 20. 

Grasmere, 197-207 ; Church and Churchyard, 206, 207. 
Gray, Thomas, 155 ; see ** A Literary Pilgrimage," 39-48. 
Greta Hall, 216, 218. 
Guiccioli, Countess, 168. 
Habberton, John, 65. 
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 17, 26, 41, 45 ; see *< Literary Haunts 

and Homes." 
Hamilton, Alexander, 36. 
Hamilton, Gavin, 182, 183, 185. 
Hammersmith, 121. 

Hampstead, 156 ; see " A Literary Pilgrimage," 13-21. 
Handel, Georg F., 155. 

226 



Index 

Harrow, 145-156. 

Harte, Bret, 73. 

Hastings, 18. 

Hathaway Cottage, 136-138. 

Hawkshead, 208, 209. 

Hawthorne, Julian, 144. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 144, 174; see " Literary Shrines," 

29-38, 58-67, 76-78, 155-198. 
Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel, Grave of, 144. 
Hazlitt, William, 140, 183. 
Headley's Cedar Lawn, 29, 30. 
Helvellyn, 208, 212. 
Hemans, Felicia D., 194, 196, 198. 
Herbert, Henry William, 48, 51, 60-63, 64 j Home at The 

Cedars, 60—62 ; Tomb, 62, 63. 
High gate, 155, 156 5 see *' A Literary Pilgrimage," 21-23. 
Highland Falls, 23. 
"Highland Mary," 170, 176, 180, 182, 187; see'* A 

Literary Pilgrimage," 194—205. 
Hobhouse, Lord, 160. 
Hoboken, 16, 40, 41. 
Hoffman, Matilda, 16 j see "Literary Haunts and Homes," 

49. 
Hogarth, William, 121, 156. 
Hogg, James, mentioned, 193. 
Holmes, Oliver W., mentioned, 43 ; see "Literary Shrines," 

94-97- 
Holt, Stockton's, 69-73. 
Hood, Thomas, Grave of, 143. 
Hook, Theodore, mentioned, 121, 145. 
Hopkinson, Francis, 104. 
Hopkinson, Joseph, 104. 

Houghton, Lord, 17, 31, 90, 143, 1^92, 209. 
Howarth, Ellen Clementine, 90; Homes, 11 5-1 18. 

227 



Index 

Howe, Julia Ward, Ii6, 198 j see " Literary Shrines," 98. 

Hucknall-Torkard, 157-169. 

Hudson Highlands, 20—30. 

Hudson River, 15—38. 

Hughes, Thomas, mentioned, 122. 

Hunt, Leigh, mentioned, 121, 156 ; Grave, 142, 143. 

*' Ichabod Crane," Home and Grave, 38. 

Idlevv^ild, Willis's, 24-27. 

Irvine, 170. 

Irving, Edward, mentioned, 170. 

Irving, Peter, 55. 

Irving, Washington, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 30, 35, 

38, 41, 42, 54, 55—58 J see "Literary Haunts and 

Homes," 174-192. 
Jameson, Anna, 143. 
** Jane Eyre," 191. 
Jefferson, Joseph, 132. 
Jersey City, 40. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, mentioned, 145, 156. 
Jones, Sir William, mentioned, 145. 
Jonson, Ben, mentioned, 130, 136. 
Juliustown, 103. 
"Junius," 121. 
Kean, Edmund, I2i. 
Keats, John, mentioned, 156, 212, 215 ; see "A Literary 

Pilgrimage," 15-17, 19, 25. 
Kelmscott, 122. 

Kemble, Gouverneur, 20, 55, 58 ; Home, 23, 24. 
Kennedy, John P., 24. 

Kensal Green, Literary Graves of, 141-145. 
Keswick, 214-218. 
Kinderhook, 38. 
Kinney, Elizabeth C, 48. 
Kirkoswald, 188. 

228 



Index 

Knight, Professor, 204. 

Lakes, The English, 190—218. 

Lamb, Charles, 140, 201, 203, 215, 217. 

Lamb, Mary, mentioned, 215. 

Leech, John, 142. 

Leigh, Mrs. Augusta (Byron), 164, 165, 167. 

Lemon, Mark, mentioned, 138. 

Lindenwold, 35. 

Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 210. 

Lippincott, Joshua R., 103. 

Loantaka Valley, 69. 

Lochlea Farm, 177—179. 

Lockhart, John G., mentioned, 193, 215. 

Lodore Falls, 216. 

London, 121, 140, 141, 155, 1575 see "A Literary Pil- 
grimage," 13-37- 

Longfellow, Henry W., mentioned, 90, 136, 138 j see "Lit- 
erary Shrines, " 106—109. 

Lossing, Benson J., 24. 

Lowell, James Russell, mentioned, 192; see "Literary 
Shrines," 110-114. 

* ' Lowood, ' ' Bronte, 191. 

Luddington, 139. 

Mabie, Hamilton W., 69. 

Madison, New Jersey, 69. 

"Major Jack Downing," 57. 

" Marion Harland," 48, 49. 

Mark Twain, mentioned, 138 j see "Literary Haunts and 
Homes," 195—197. 

Marryat, Capt. Frederick, 121. 

Martineau, Harriet, mentioned, 198 ; Home, 194, 195. 

Massey, Gerald, 136, 210. 

Mathers, Margaret Herbert, 62. 

Mauchline, 180-184. 

229 



Index 

McCarthy, Justin H., mentioned, 90. 

McLellan, Isaac, 61 5 see " Literary Haunts and Homes," 
147, 148. 

Merwin, Jesse, 37, 38. 

Millais, John Everett, 142. 

Miller, Joaquin, 90, 165. 

Milnes, Monckton, mentioned, 17, 31, 143, 192, 209. 

Montclair, 65, 

Moore, Thomas, 1045 in Newark, 53, 54. 

Morris, George P., 24, 25, 26. 

Morris, William, mentioned, 122. 

Morristown, 69, 73. 

Mossgiel Farm, 183, 185-188. 

Motley, John L., 142. 

Motherwell, William, mentioned, 170. 

Mount Gulian, 30, 31. 

Mount Oliphant, 176, 177. 

Mulock, Dinah, mentioned, 122 j see "A Literary Pilgrim- 
age," 92. 

Nab Cottage, 199. 

Nast, Thomas, 73. 

Newark, 42-63. 

Newburg and Bay, 25, 29, 30, 31. 

Newlands, 214. 

Newstead Abbey, mentioned, 157, 160, 161, 162, 1635 see 
"A Literary Pilgrimage," 80—90. 

Nutley, 65. 

Nyack, 19. 

Ogden, Henry, mentioned, 55. 

Orange Mountain, 65, 69, 72. 

Paine, Thomas, 104 ; see " Literary Haunts and Homes," 155. 

Palmer, Ray, 59. 

Paulding, James K,, 20, 24, 31, 34, 55-58 ; at Placedentia, 
34 5 see " Literary Haunts and Homes." 

230 



Index 

Pavonia, 40. 

Peel, Robert, 145, 147, 151. 

Perceval, Spencer, mentioned, 145, 147. 

Philipse's Grange, 20. 

Piermont, 19. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 16, 20, 45 5 see "Literary Haunts and 
Homes," 104-128, 

Pope, Alexander, 121, 156. 

Poughkeepsie, 31. 

Princeton CoUege, 44. 

Putney, 121. 

Ramapo, mentioned, 72, 

Ramsay, Allan, 189. 

Rawnsley, Canon, 208. 

Richardson, Samuel, I2i. 

Ripley, George, mentioned, 136. 

Riverby, Burroughs' s, 31-33. 

Roe, E. P., Homes of, 23, 27-29. 

Roelands, 27, 28. 

Roe Park, 28. 

Rogers, Samuel, mentioned, 215. 

*'Rokeby," Scott's, 190, 192. 

Rossetti, Dante, G., 90, 121, 122, 127, 213 ; see "A Liter- 
ary Pilgrimage," 31-34. 

"Rudder Grange," Stockton's, 65-68. 

Rugby, mentioned, 122. 

Ruskin, John, mentioned, 90, 191, 198 5 Brantwood Home, 
210-213. 

Rutherford, 64-68. 

Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's, 196-198. 

Saint John, Vale of, 214. 

Sands, Robert C, 16, 40, 41. 

Scafell Pike, 209, 210. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 41, 122, 125, 193, 201, 208, 212, 214. 

231 



Index 

Shakespeare, Judith, 124, 126. 

Shakespeare, William, 1 21-139 5 Birthplace, 123 5 Memorial, 
I35> 13^ ) New Place, 127-129 j Tomb, 1 31-134. 

Shanter Farm, 188. 

Shaw, Dr. Albert, 18. 

Shelley, Harriet, 214, 215. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 45, 46, 122, 156 5 Residence at Kes- 
wick, 214, 215; see *'A Literary Pilgrimage," 229- 
231. 

Sheridan, Richard B., 141, 145. 

Shottery, 136-138. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 21 3. 

Sketch Club, 40. 

Skiddaw, 215-218. 

Slabsides, Burroughs' s, 33, 34. 

Sleepy Hollow, 19 ; see " Literary Haunts and Homes," 186- 
192. 

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 116. 

Smith, Sydney, 141, 1435 see *' A Literary Pilgrimage," 
148-160. 

Snake Hill, 41, 42. 

Somervile, William, mentioned, 122. 

Southey, Robert, 198, 201, 215 ; at Keswick, 216-218. 

Southworth, Emma D. E. N., 17. 

Speed, John Gilmer, 73. 

Spenser, Edmund, 210. 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 46, 47, 48 ; Newark Home, 47 ; 
see "Literary Haunts and Homes." 

Stephens, Ann S., 35. 

Sterne, Laurence, 141, 190 ; see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 
111-120. 

Stockton, Frank R., 64-84, 102, 103 ; in Virginia, 73-84 : 
Homes, Claymont, 77-84 5 Convent, 69-73 ; Elmwood, 
74, 75 ; Lego, 75, 76 5 Rutherford, 64-68. 

232 



Index 

Stoddard, Richard Henry, mentioned, 47 ; see " Literary- 
Haunts and Homes." 

Stoke Pogis, 155 ; see "A Literary Pilgrimage," 39—48. 

Stratford-on-Avon, 1 21-139. 

Sunnyside, Irving' s, 19 ; see *' Literary Haunts and Homes," 
174-184. 

Swinburne, Algernon, mentioned, 90, 121. 

Symonds, John Addington, mentioned, 90. 

Talleyrand, Prince, 44. 

Tannahill, Robert, 170. 

Tappan Sea, 19. 

Tarbolton, 179, 180. 

Tarrytown, 195 see *' Literary Haunts and Homes," 184— 
192. 

Taylor, Bayard, 26, 27, 47, 125, 136. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 85, 90, 122, 125, 138, 207, 209, 213. 

Thackeray, William M., 17, 125, 147, 156, 1725 Grave, 
142. 

Thames, 155. 

Thames Literary Shrines, 121, 122 j see "A Literary Pil- 
grimage," 24-38. 

Thirlmere, 213, 214. 

Thomson, James, 121. 

Thoreau, Henry D., 39; see "Literary Shrines," 19-22, 
39-41, 68-74. 

Timber Creek, Walt Whitman, 95-97. 

Townsend, Mary A., 30. 

Traubel, Horace L., 94, 95. 

Trenton, 1 06-1 18. 

Trollope, Anthony, 142, 145, 146. 

Turner, Joseph M. W., mentioned, 191 5 see " A Literary 
Pilgrimage," 37, 142-3. 

Twickenham, 121. 

Undercliff, Gen. Morris's, 24, 25. 

233 



Index 

Vale of Saint John, 214. 

Van Buren, Martin, 35, 36. 

Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 16. 

Verplanck, Gulian C, 16, 30, 41. 

Virginia, Stockton in, 73—84. 

Walpole, Horace, mentioned, 121. 

Walton, Isaac, mentioned, 125. 

Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 59. 

Ward, Herbert D., 59. 

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 192. 

Ward, Dr. William Hayes, 59. 

Warner, Anna B., 20. 

Warner, Charles Dudley, 1365 see *' Literary Haunts and 

Homes," 197-200. 
Warner, Henry W., 21. 

Warner, Susan, Grave of, 22 ; Home of, 20-23. 
Warren, Samuel, mentioned, 140. 
Warwick, mentioned, 122. 
Watchung Mountain, 65, 69, 72. 
West Park, Burroughs, 31-33. 
Whipple, E. P., mentioned, 26. 
Whitefield, George, 43. 
Whitman Land, 32-34. 
Whitman, Walt, Haunts of, 85-99 j Camden Homes, 86- 

95 ; Grave at Harleigh, 97-99 ; Timber Creek, 95-97 j 

see ** Literary Shrines," 201-217 j see " Literary Haunts 

and Homes," 135-147. 
Whittier, John G., mentioned, 43 ; see "Literary Shrines," 

122-127, 138-9. 
Wildman, Col. Thomas, 151, 160, 163, 167. 
Willis, N. P., 24, 52 ; Home, 25-27. 
Wilmcote, 139. 
Wilson, John, 192, 193, 198. 
Windermere, 192-194, 197. 



Index 

Winter, William, mentioned, 39, 132, 136. 

Wolsey, Thomas, 155. 

Wordsworth, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 208, 209, 

210, 213, 215, 216, 217, 2185 Birthplace, 209; 

Dove Cottage, 200-206 j Grasmere Churchyard, 206, 

207 5 Hawkshead School, 208-9 j Ryd^ Mount, 196- 

199. 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 

213. 
Yates, Edmund, mentioned, 136. 
Yonkers, 17, 18. 



235 



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